


Low Winter Sun

by 0h_king_of_edible_leaves



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Blood and Injury, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, POV Multiple, Post-Breaking Bad, Post-El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 36,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28373394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0h_king_of_edible_leaves/pseuds/0h_king_of_edible_leaves
Summary: Imagines events post El Camino, as Jesse prepares for his new life in Alaska with the assistance of Ed "The Disappearer".Ed and Jesse go road-trippin'. Featuring angst, all the feelings, banter and funky jamz.New Chapter: A Day of R&R: AMIn which Ed and Jesse each get all up in their heads and way too much coffee is consumed.(Plus a bit more non-canon backstory, because why not. It's all up for grabs.)
Comments: 103
Kudos: 41





	1. The First Day

**Author's Note:**

> I binged on Breaking Bad during some quarantine and finished it off with El Camino, and then... the story kept going in my head and here we are, 10,000 words and counting later.  
> Since I seem to be in some kind of flow, I figured I may as well post this up with the hope someone enjoys it. Perhaps that's you; who's to say? First chapter out of a potential many.  
> Alright, so: Chapter 1 was inspired by a deleted El Camino scene I stumbled upon on Youtube. This work deviates somewhat from what was filmed, but I've retained some elements. I wanted to expand a bit on the Vacuum Man himself, and deepen his air of calm mystery. More characters will show up as the story progresses, some flashbacks, some tags will be added yadda yadda. This is my first time writing something like fanfiction, but the story has been front and centre of my mind's eye for weeks now, and it honestly feels like something, so here we are. Hope you enjoy.

Ed Galbraith was a cautious, quiet man. He took his time. He thought before he acted, which was why, when he saw the Fiero parked on the dirt track beside his store, he didn’t rush over to it. First, he parked his car. He got out, locked it, walked over to the side entrance of his business like he did every morning and unlocked the door.

Inside, he flicked the lights on, illuminating the workshop, the showroom and he walked through each, looking around as he did every morning. Inside was, to any eye other than his, a chaotic mishmash of vacuum cleaner parts, nozzles and bag attachments. A confusion of wires sprung from a basket, piles of dusty cloths and scattered tools.

To Ed’s eye it was a puzzle, a maze, a set piece of careful design. Everything artfully arranged to draw gazes that weren’t his own away from things he didn’t want to be seen. This morning, like all the other mornings, found nothing out of place. In the showroom, the strip lighting hummed, one set of tubes over the cash register flickering briefly and he gazed up at it, made a mental note to see to it later. Perhaps all it needed was tightening.

Up against the wall of the workshop was a long MDF workstation, linoleum countertop chipped and stained, covered with Ed’s latest repairs and projects. He swept the array of vacuum cleaner parts to one side. He fiddled with the edge of the countertop, applying pressure in just the right places until it shifted and slid down and away. Reaching into the space that appeared, he levered out a small hinged platform, upon which rested a police scanner.

Ed switched it on. He already knew about the explosion and the fire out on an industrial site in the north of the city, having heard it on the radio news as he was getting dressed that morning. It seemed as though the fire was still being brought under control and the streets in the immediate vicinity were being patrolled and cordoned off. Between the explosion and bodies needed on the ground for the site of the Heisenberg ‘standoff’, the police were being spread thin. 

There was a coffee machine in his workshop, and he turned his attention to that now. He added three scoops of coffee to the filter, paused, then added a fourth and less water than he normally did. As it bubbled and steamed, he booted up his computer, played the answering machine for messages left past close (none) and checked over the list of repairs that were scheduled to be picked up today (two- one Maytag, a Dyson). The store wasn’t due to open for another hour, but he was a man who liked to get a head start on things.

As the coffee brewed, he listened. No car doors slamming shut, no sirens, no frantic knocks on either of the store’s doors. Only the gentle _whoosh_ of traffic as the good people of the world went about their morning business. About five minutes had passed since he had turned on the scanner and there was no mention of anything that aroused his concern. The air in the workshop was beginning to fill with the deep nutty scent of the coffee. He switched the scanner off and tucked it away, scattering the vacuum parts back where they had been.

When it was ready, he poured the coffee out into the blue mug. No sugar, no cream. It was still too hot to drink, but he took it with him when he returned to the side entrance and swung open the door. The Fiero was still there. Ignition was off, tires looked sound. He leaned against the doorway, brought the mug up to his lips as he scanned the road. The traffic was light at this time in the morning and he was too far out on the edges of the city for pedestrians to stroll past unexpectedly.

There was one occupant in the front driver’s seat, slumped to the side and unmoving. As a man who paid attention to details, Ed had made a note of how the figure was slumped when he initially arrived, and although he was now looking at the figure from a different angle, he could tell there’d been no movement.

“Well,” he said, before taking one more sip of coffee. He gave a little satisfied grunt of appreciation for the warmth, the caffeine kick and set the mug down on a shelving unit.

Pinkman was asleep, but not deeply. More passed out than asleep and because of that, Ed knew he could react in panic when woken up- and panic made men unpredictable. Because he was a cautious man, he paid attention to the muscles in Pinkman’s face, the set of his shoulders and the position of his hands which were coated in rust coloured blood. When Ed knocked on the window, he did so softly and when Pinkman startled awake, levelling the gun at him, he threw up his hands to show he was unarmed. 

“How we doing?” 

Wordlessly, Pinkman popped the trunk. Ed went to look; he didn’t need to count the money in the duffel bag to know that it was enough. _Okay_ , he thought, _let’s get this done_.

Opening the driver side door, he crouched to Pinkman’s level.

“Give me the gun, please.”

Pinkman’s face went ridged with fear, suspicion. He was still expecting to be betrayed, even though Ed had promised he was a man of his word.

“Whatever happens from here on out, you won’t need it no more.”

The fear in Pinkman’s face shifted, no longer of Ed’s intentions, but of being suddenly so close to what he wanted. Fear of no longer needing to be afraid and what that would mean for him. Fear of being allowed to nurture the hope that still had not been extinguished.

Ed tossed the gun into the duffel bag, zipped it. Time to move.

He checked to make sure Pinkman could walk unaided, gave him the rundown of what was to come – moving the car first, then tending to Pinkman’s wounds- in other words, Ed’s well-being before Pinkman’s, but in a couple of hours everything would set in motion. Pinkman sounded surprised at the idea he got to choose where he ended up. Ed figured the kid most have some kind of idea of where at least, but in the silence that followed he wasn’t so sure.

“You think about it,” he called over his shoulder as he hustled the bags inside. The sound they made as they thumped onto his work station seemed to echo behind him. He turned and glimpsed Pinkman sprawled on the dusty ground outside. He was trying to lift himself up, arms shaking, coughing from the dirt and the effort. All he managed by the time Ed got to him was to flip himself onto his back, grimacing in pain, and Ed could see why now that his shirt had hitched further up. A gunshot wound just above his hip, missing everything vital by the look of it, but the bullet still lodged under the skin.

“Whoopsie-daisies,” Ed said as he hoisted him into sitting upright. Pinkman whimpered as he struggled to get his feet back under him and half stumbled half fell into the open doorway.

“You keep pressure on that,” Ed guided Pinkman’s hand to his side, “while I take care of that.” He jerked his head towards the car. The kid had desperation on his face, his free hand gripping the doorjamb white knuckled.

“Am I-“ he stammered hoarsely, unable to ask the question Ed could see in his eyes.

“No, son. This is the first day of your life, not the last.”

He took a roll of garbage bags out with him to cover the Fiero’s blood-soaked seat and drove the car around the back and into his workshop, out of sight.


	2. Cautious Men

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some more Ed POV because he's fun. The art of disappearing...

At 7am, Ed Galbraith sends two text messages. One to a man in British Colombia, another to a man in Wyoming. The texts are identical, containing only an ellipsis and a letter: _…a_

He knows the messages will be deleted once they are read. At first glance they will look like the fat fingered efforts of an older man unfamiliar with texting, but Ed Galbraith is a cautious man who works with other cautious men. _Wait 12 hours_ , the ellipsis says. _A_ is the first of twelve possible numbers, which all three have committed to memory. This one designates a payphone he uses for his hottest clients.

The art of disappearing someone, and it was an art, had gotten more complicated than when Ed first got into the game. Long gone were the days he could drop someone off in a town a few states over with a fresh haircut, a clean shirt and a fistful of forged paperwork. Now tech was king, and anyone without a couple of digital footprints raised suspicion. His contact in Wyoming is the best at inserting records where they should be if anyone gets curious enough to look. Ed doesn’t know yet where this Pinkman kid wants to go, but if he’s going to have a second life, he is going to need to use all his skills to craft his existence.

Ed admits to himself the thrill of this new challenge; his last client was complicated, no doubt, but the creative angle was lacking. That was a case of ‘hide and seek’. No point working out a backstory when the man only had a few months left to live. Best he could do was stick him somewhere isolated, work up an ID that would obfuscate matters should anyone stumble across him and wait. Keep him comfortable, well, as comfortable as a freezing cabin in New Hampshire could be, and…wait. This kid has his health, he’s young, he has a chance to do something with a new identity and Ed is savvy enough to give him one.

At 7:45 he unlocks store entrance and flips the sign to OPEN.

8:20 sees his first customer of the day, a middle-aged woman coming to pick up the Maytag. They make small talk about the weather (it’s a beautiful, clear day) and she pays him $77.20 for parts and labour, rounded up to $80 for which Ed is quietly appreciative of; it’s a small tip, but he’s aware it’s not an insignificant one for her. Once she’s left, he checks on his client via the monitor feed in his workroom.

Pinkman collapsed from exhaustion after he got him downstairs so he isn’t expecting to see him moving around yet. And indeed, he’s still out, saline drip going steady. It was a stroke of luck having the IV in the first place; part of the medical leftovers he’d been supplying to ‘Mr. Lambert’. Ed had had to perform patch-up jobs on clients in the past, and while Pinkman wasn’t the direst case he’d seen, the state of him still shocked. News about the pit had been leaked to the press, that Pinkman had been kept there not confirmed (or denied) by the police. Seeing the truth of it on his body was something else; the criss-crossed scars, deep and ragged. The result of deliberate, measured cruelty.

The kid stayed passed out when Ed was taking the bullet out of his side, lay motionless as he stitched and cleaned him up. The mattress will have to be tossed at some point he reckons. Not too much blood on it considering, but too much all the same.

He changes the saline bag at 9:15 and that’s when he hears his client croak out “ _Alaska_.”

“Alaska is…where I’m gonna go.” Ed looks down at him and he tries to look back, eyes fuzzy and pleading.

“We can do that, sure, son. No problem.”

It’s quiet in the late morning with only a handful of vacuum related phone calls to handle, two browsers dropping by to compare prices and check out what Ed’s got on offer. He doesn’t make any sales. Instead, he looks over road maps in the backroom, his finger tracing potential routes to Alaska.


	3. Gourmet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spycraft fun with Ed.

It’s dark when Ed Galbraith drives out to a shopping complex on the west-side of town. Made up of a Goodwill, a discount furniture emporium with a reputation for wares that fall apart before a year is through; a mattress store, a shuttered bowling alley. It wasn’t a site that drew in a lot of customers, and as such the complex management tended to let things slide into disrepair. Pot holes in the lot, broken signage. A thin spread of security cameras with only half of them in working order. One can never be too careful.

Ed checks his watch as he pulls up and parks near a bank of payphones. One minute to seven. He gets out of his car as one of the payphones begins to ring.

The voice on the other end crackles over the long-distance line from British Columbia. ‘How’s the weather?’

‘Hot sure, but not a scorcher like the other day. Same system coming through. We’re getting the tail end of it,’ Ed responds casually.

‘That so?’

‘That so. But tell me, how’s business?’

‘Can’t complain. Got some new cars in. Old models, but reliable. Shouldn’t take too long to spruce up.’

‘They don’t make them like they used to. Better get some snow tires on whatever you got coming in. I hear you got snow coming before the end of the month.’

‘Snow, eh?’

‘Better believe it. Lotta snow.’

‘Alright then. I’ll keep that in mind,’ says the voice. ‘More work never did anyone any harm; idle hands and all that. Speaking of, when are you taking a holiday, old man?’

‘Soon as I win the lottery.’

‘You got the winning numbers?’

‘Yep; 59, 23, 58 then 13, 54, 45 and a zero for luck. But listen, sit on them a while. Numbers won’t be coming up yet. Best bide your time a week or two before you play.’

‘Alright then, I’ll sit tight.’ There’s a click as the line disconnects and Ed hangs the phone in the cradle.

Twenty seconds later it rings again.

‘Slowpoke.’

‘Again?’ This voice is clearer than the last. ‘One of these days I’ll cut in first.’

‘Easy, young buck.’

‘Alright, old man. What’re you thinking.’

‘Details still need to be worked out, but I’ll walk you through the particulars when I have them.’

‘Oh? You coming up?’

‘That I am. In fact, I’m gonna need a hand getting the truck through.’

‘Sunday?’ The day after tomorrow. Pinkman wouldn’t have recovered enough by then.

‘No good. Cargo’s kinda… fragile.’

There’s a thoughtful pause ‘Hmm. Next best window is a week from Tuesday. Early.’

‘That I can do.’

The man in Wyoming hangs up without saying goodbye. Now Ed has some shopping to do.

The Goodwill has a fair selection of coats and sweaters, though not much that’ll see Pinkman through an Alaskan winter. Ed picks out a couple of long-sleeved t-shirts, some boots and a jacket, asks the man at the cashiers for a receipt.

Ed had left Pinkman sleeping at the store, put a bottle of water by the side of the camp bed along with a note explaining he’d gone to run some errands and that leaving the basement was strictly forbidden. He’d left some orange slices by the side of the bed too, figured he hadn’t been getting much in the way of vitamins from the Nazis.

Ed had been thinking about the pit for most of the afternoon, and now, stopped at a red light on the way back to his store, he mulled over the psychological weight of it. He’d known men who had been to war, who had been captured and spent time holed up in not dissimilar circumstances. He remembers conversations had with rescued men now long dead, their confessions and fears, how time and their own thoughts both tormented and comforted them during captivity. What they had missed, what they had longed for. How they had become strangers to themselves.

What would Pinkman become after this, he wondered. Ed knew better than to ask about the months he’d spent down there, but he couldn’t help himself for imagining.

The light changed and he made a right turn at the last minute, pulling up to a supermarket and emerging half an hour later, bags laden with underpants, toiletries- necessities, but also mince beef, spices. Organic, expensive stuff.

Ed was aware of a dangerous sympathy worming its way under his skin; he’d need to keep it in check, but in the meantime the kid needed to eat and Ed was a damn good cook.


	4. Good Burger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do a shot everytime Ed sighs.

Ed doesn’t have much in the way of cooking facilities at the vacuum store, just a two-ring burner, a toaster, a mini fridge. Normally it’s enough to keep his clients fed in sandwiches and fruit. Sometimes they sneer at the fruit, drug dealers and blackmailers who somehow think they don’t need fibre. Not any of Ed’s business; he’s not running a restaurant, but as a man who cares about what goes into his body, he doesn’t see how a healthy diet undermines the veneer of hardened criminality these guys try to project, even sitting in his basement waiting to be whisked off to a new life.

Pinkman eats the fruit, as Ed can see on the monitor. He’s awake, lying in the camp bed with one of the orange slices clamped between his teeth like a mouth-guard. He’s tapping the peel with his fingers, occasionally making slow motion punches at the air, his face. Playing.

Ed watches for a minute, sighs and shakes his head. _Kid_ , he thinks and turns his attention to the mince beef.

Smoked paprika, cumin. The merest pinch of cinnamon. A dusting of cayenne. Ed chops half an onion, browns it in a pan, massages some bread crumbs into the mince, binding all the components together. He washes his hands, picks up the bags of clothes and heads into the basement.

Pinkman jolts upright when Ed nudges the door open, winces as his stitches tug against his side.

“No need to get up on my account,” Ed tells him. “How we doing?”

“Okay, I think,” Pinkman rasps. He’s drunk all the water, so Ed hands him another bottle and sits on the spare bed. He’s looking a little feverish, breathing fast but his eyes are clearer than they were that morning.

“Hungry?”

Pinkman nods as he gulps the water down.

“I’ll bring something down soon, but in the meantime-” Ed points to the duffle bags of money in the corner. “I’ve left them as they are so you’d know I’d not cheated you outta nothing, but it’s time we settled accounts.” Pinkman waves a hand as if to say _help yourself_ and Ed drags the bags into the space between them. He counts out ten thousand, twenty, eighty, one hundred thousand, creating a pyramid on the bed of stacked notes. Once he hits the first hundred and twenty-five thousand, he creates a second pile. A quarter of a million in fifties and hundreds.

“A third, my ass,” Pinkman says once he sees what’s left in the bag.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, the guy…this…welder. He took way more than a ‘ _third'."_ Ed decides it’s probably better if he doesn’t ask. Instead, he tosses the clothes he bought earlier onto the end of the bed. Pinkman rummages through the bag, grunting with the effort. He seems trepidatious at first, then surprised.

“These actually look okay.” He unfolds a sweater, soft grey knit and a pair of dark jeans. No tighty-whities in sight. He looks at Ed apologetically in response to his raised eyebrow. “I guess I was expecting… you know, like… old people clothes. No offence or anything.”

“None taken,” Ed says drily. He produces the receipts from his pocket. “Came to $80.75.”

Pinkman gives him a blank look then when it clicks, he growls, “You’re not serious? For _real_? You have two hundred and fifty _thousand_ dollars and you want more? Another _eighty_ dollars?”

“And seventy-five cents.”

“Oh right, and seventy-five cents. Excuse me.” Pinkman huffs indignantly. “Seriously, man, just…” he gestures to the two piles of money on Ed’s bed.

Ed sighs, levels a hard stare at him. “Don’t get greedy, son.”

“ _Me_? _I’m_ the one that’s greedy?”

“Yes, you are. Your former partner was greedy too. He quibbled over every dollar, and how did that work out for him? Always thought he was owed more, always thought he was being cheated. He thought Fring cheated him out of what was his, thought Goodman did likewise, even thought I did too. Walter White against the world. But maybe you’ve got more sense than your old partner, seeing as you made it as far as you have. Now, I provide a service, yes? The fee you pay isn’t a result of greed, it’s calculated. Careful considerations have been made to ensure my clients, i.e. you, receive the best possible service for their money. You want a new life, an _airtight_ new life? _This_ is what it costs.

“This ain’t the _Galbraith Foundation for Wayward Delinquents_ , so if it’s charity you want, I suggest you look elsewhere for your sartorial needs and I guess I’ll take my clothes back.”

Pinkman looks almost sheepish. “Sar…torial?”

“Related to clothing, son.”

Pinkman lets out a quiet little, _oh_ , and pauses before drawing out a fistful of money from the bag, holds up a hundred dollar bill. 

“I can make change,” Ed says, taking out his wallet. He hands Pinkman a sheaf of singles and a quarter.

“And look at that- you still have a big bag of money. The world kept on spinning. Now, might I suggest you take some time to clean yourself up? I’ll change those bandages and bring you down something to eat once you’re done.”

“How much is that gonna set me back? Can you put it on my tab?” The teenager in Pinkman can’t help making a final sarcastic jab. 

“It’s on the house,” Ed replies, scooping his quarter million into a black trash bag.

Back upstairs he shapes the mince meat into a burger patty and cooks it, medium rare, arranges it all on a plate on a tray along with a selection of condiments. When he returns, Pinkman has showered away the grime and crusted blood and put on a pair of a drawstring sweatpants. He’s got his arms crossed over himself, shoulders hunched, self-conscious of his scars. Perhaps it’s the first time he’s taken stock of his body since he left the compound, seeing in the bathroom mirror the extent of the damage done to it. He’s pale and worn out from the effort of moving around, still weak though when Ed places the tray with the burger on the side table his eyes widen.

“That’s for me?”

Ed shrugs to say _who else?_ and busies himself with putting on a pair of surgical gloves.

“Help yourself to the condiments. I wasn’t sure what you’d like so I brought them all down.” There’s burger relish, three kinds of mustard, ketchup, mayo, sriracha; a veritable forest of jars and bottles. “Might have gone a little overboard,” he admits.

He guides Pinkman to the edge of the bed, sits down with him and inspects the stitches. They’re holding up well, no sign of infection. Pinkman hisses through his teeth when Ed swabs some disinfectant over the wounds and applies fresh bandages.

The old bandages are piled on top of the jeans Pinkman arrived in. The waistband is stiff with dried blood and there’s no chance of salvaging them. Ed bundles them into the trash, sees the towel laying on the bathroom floor in a puddle, sighs and hangs it over the shower railing to dry.

“You take your time with that,” he says, meaning the burger. Pinkman hasn’t taken his eyes off it, but he’s made no move to touch it either. “I don’t imagine you’ve had much in the way of three squares a day lately; if you eat too fast it’s liable to make it’s way back up you, so, go easy.”

Pinkman’s face has contorted into mix of emotions Ed can’t parse.

“I didn’t peg you for a vegetarian,” he says.

“I’m not.” Pinkman’s voice is thick and low. He picks up the bottle of ketchup gingerly, like he’s expecting it to bite him. “It’s just… been a while since I got to…” Pinkman lets the sentence hang but Ed can hear the _choose_ all the same.

He says nothing in response, but watches as Pinkman deliberates; the kid’s eyes are shining, threatening to spill over. Suddenly something clicks, as if he realises the food isn’t a mirage and it’s not going to vanish when he takes a bite. He heaps on relish, ketchup, and ungodly amount of mustard to Ed’s eyes, until they’re oozing out the sides. The structural integrity of the bun is strong enough to support all the juices without getting soggy, Ed’s pleased to note. Pinkman bites, chews, swallows contemplatively, the first homecooked meal he’s had in half a year.

“ _Damn_ ,” he says, studying the burgers innards. He glances up at Ed in surprise. “You _made this_? _You_?”

“Slow down.”

“S’good. Li’rullygud,” he says as he chews, but he listens, slows down. There’s mustard and ketchup smeared in the corners of his mouth, making a run for his chin. Ed takes his handkerchief out of his pocket, hands it to Pinkman. He also takes out a pair of prescription bottles from his jacket, puts them on the side table and says “Didn’t want you taking these on an empty stomach. Antibiotic and a painkiller. For that hole in your side. Take this one twice a day, after you’ve eaten. As for the painkiller, no more than four in twenty-four hours.”

There’s a clock on the wall and Ed points to it now. “I’ll be back around seven tomorrow morning.”

“Yer’mgoin?”

“I need my beauty sleep.” It’s nearly ten. “You realise I don’t live at the store, yes?” Ed says in response to the confusion in Pinkman’s eyes. The kid blushes.

“Ha, yeah. Duh. Seven.”

“You’ve got plenty water here. An apple to tide you over. You get some rest and tomorrow I’ll walk you through what’s next.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jesse is absolutely drumming out the tune of 'Fallacies' on the orange peel in his mouth. In case you were in any doubt.


	5. Philosophically Speaking

Over 60 hours of driving. 3,363 miles of road. Ed lays out the maps in the vacuum store basement, drags his finger up from New Mexico into Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, over the thick line that separates the US from Canada. Pinkman follows with his eyes as he munches the breakfast Ed brought him; a herby chorizo tortilla washed down with apple juice. He gave it the same long stare as the burger the night before, seemed surprised Ed had turned up at seven on the dot. Right when he said he would. Ed needs to keep him from wolfing the food down again; the morning sees Pinkman a better colour than the previous day, but he’s slick with sweat and he moves like all his joints are frozen.

The kid hasn’t touched the painkillers and Ed doesn’t feel he can press the matter. Keep him hydrated, fed, hidden, that’s his job for the time being.

“When do we go?” Pinkman asks him between bites.

“Need to be here,” Ed points to a small dot labelled _Sweet Grass,_ right on the border, “by Tuesday after next.”

“I don’t even know what day it is now.”

“Saturday. I don’t make it a habit to have someone down here as long as you’ll be, but I don’t want you bustin’ outta your stitches on the road,” Ed says as he folds up the map. “We’ll leave here in a week. Take us two days to the border, and then ‘round abouts another six to get you where you need to be.”

“And you’re just gonna…drive me up in your mini-van?” Pinkman waves the fork as he speaks, sending little splatters of potato and egg onto Ed’s leg. Ed sighs (he’s been sighing a lot since Pinkman became a client) and Pinkman has the good sense to look embarrassed though he doesn’t outright apologise. Ed dabs at the grease with his fresh handkerchief.

“Nope, I won’t be driving you up in the mini-van. We’ll get to your transport when we get to it. Now, let me have a look at you.” The swelling around the bullet holes have gone down, Ed’s pleased to see. As he dresses the wounds, he can sense Pinkman is restless with questions, but whatever they are, he keeps them to himself.

The plate has been practically licked clean and Ed gathers it up while Pinkman pulls a sweater on. For all his twenty-five years, scars and shaved head, he somehow manages to look about twelve in that moment.

“Why don’t you set up there,” Ed suggests, jerking his head in the direction of the second bed. The sheets on Pinkman’s could use freshening up. He complies, meekly settling against the pillows, already lost to the churn of his thoughts.

Saturday is a busier day at the vacuum shop. More customers rolling by to browse, a couple of repair pick-ups and drop offs. There’s never a rush, never more than two customers in the store at any given time. Ed spends half an hour talking over his wares with a man who behaves as though Ed’s honest advice is not, in fact, honest. The kind of customer who seems to make a hobby of showing up in stores only to complain. He leaves, muttering he could get it cheaper on Amazon, and Ed briefly mourns the thirty minutes of his life wasted on such a man.

He does make a sale to a couple who are clearly moving in together for the first time, two young men barely out of their teens. They inspect each vacuum as thoroughly and as seriously as UN weapons inspectors. They settle on the second most pricey Dyson, and when Ed charms them with his 10% ‘love-birds’ discount, some of their reserve towards him crumbles away. They leave, smiling, the balance of the day restored after the grumpiness left by the Amazon Man.

He checks on Pinkman regularly via the monitor feed. He spends most of the day in fitful, twitching sleep, waking long enough to take tentative walks around the basement. Ed watches as he wobbles from wall to wall, but notes how his strides grow longer and steadier with every step. When Ed heads down with lunch (chili made with the left-over mince), the kid is asleep again, face screwed up against god-knows-what dreams, blankets askew. He leaves the bowl on the side and draws the covers back over him.

Pinkman wakes and eats sometime between closing and Ed’s third trip to the basement with dinner (fusilli with a homemade basil pesto, arugula, sundried tomatoes). The chili is gone and he’s asleep yet again, breathing deeply and evenly this time, face calmer and looser. Ed gently places a hand on his forehead and is relieved to find it cooler than it had been.

He strips the other bed of its sweat-soaked sheets, makes it up with fresh, despairs when he discovers the towel lying in a puddle in the bathroom. Again, he sighs; again, he hangs it up. There’s a metal folding chair in the corner which he kicks open and settles into with some vacuum business paperwork he’s been neglecting. He works for an hour before Pinkman yawns awake; he doesn’t startle when he notices Ed across the room, instead gives him the faintest beginning of a smile.

“You’re looking stronger,” Ed says by way of greeting.

“Yo,” Pinkman says, eyeing the pasta. “Honestly, I don’t know why you’re in the disappearing business when you can cook like this. Shi-stuff is seriously good, Mr. Galbraith.”

“Ed’s fine.”

He continues with his paperwork while Pinkman eats. He doesn’t need to warn him about eating too fast; he takes his time and once he’s done, Ed puts down his papers and pen.

“Reckon you’re ready for your close-up?”

“My…?”

“Photo op. Need to get the ball rolling on the new you.” Ed notes the slight clenching of Pinkman’s jaw. “Let’s head up.”

He doesn’t help Pinkman out of bed, but he keeps a tactful distance behind him on the short walk up the stairs leading out of the basement, hands ready to be raised in case the kid stumbles. He unfurls the neutral backdrop and moves Pinkman into position. Ed studies his client through the camera lens, lowers it.

“Try to relax, son. You’re at the DMV. No need for that pistols-at-dawn stare.” Pinkman closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. His eyes flutter open. Ed snaps.

“There we are. Better.” A moment later and the image is on the computer screen. Pinkman’s face in the Alaskan driver’s license template, _X’_ s where his name should be.

“Who am I going to be?”

“Philosophically speaking,” Ed says as he adjusts the picture, “that’s up to you.”

Pinkman has quickly become accustomed to Ed’s economical turn of phrase, how he is able to get to the heart of a matter in a way that catches him off guard, and he lets out a little half-laugh. “Yeah, I guess so. Philosophically speaking.”

“Practically speaking, you have some options.”

“Can I make up my own name?”

“We have to work within limits. You can veto, but,” Ed hands him a piece of paper. “I think this will suit.” Pinkman reads it.

“Ellis Driscoll.” He rolls his shoulders back, straightens his back, reads the name again like he’s sliding into a suit. “I like it.”

“Alright, then. Mr. Driscoll it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say thank you for all the kind comments and positive feedback this story has been getting. I'm having oodles of fun writing it, so thanks for sticking around. Let's see where it goes.


	6. An Honest-to-God Actual Typewriter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Angst to Funyuns.

The week leading up to their departure crawls by. Pinkman sleeps much of the time and swings between nervous chatter and brooding, tight-lipped silence when Ed brings down his meals. The wounds in his side are healing well, but the ones in his head still tear into him while he sleeps. Ed takes to bringing fresh bedding when he descends to the basement in the mornings, to replace what Pinkman has sweat through during the night. By Monday, he’s changing the sheets himself, lacking Ed’s military precision when it comes to folding the corners, but Ed appreciates the effort nonetheless.

Ed’s mindful of the demons that can swoop down on a man when he’s left alone with little more than his thoughts for stimulation, so he works quickly, coordinating with his guy in Wyoming to design Ellis Driscoll’s life.

One of the skills Ed has that makes him the best at what he does is forethought; he keeps his finger on the pulse of policy changes, of technological trends. He anticipates and adapts. He knows the key to the tightest identity is just enough flavour to make a person a _person_ , not just a name on a driving license. He knows how hard it’s gotten to move through the world without the right documentation, and he knows how suspicions can be raised when there’s a lack of searchable, findable information. The majority of people he disappears into new lives, are no longer completely invisible, but one better; they’re ignored.

So, on Tuesday morning, he arrives at the vacuum store with a file of Mr. Driscoll’s life thus far.

“What is this?” Pinkman asks when Ed plops the file into his lap. He’s sitting up in bed, in one of his bored, punk moods; Ed’s familiar with clients getting squirrely as their date of departure draws closer, and all the myriad ways they express their anxieties. Pinkman’s in limbo; it’s been one week since he escaped from the compound, one week to go until he’s over the Canadian border and on his way to Alaska. Equidistant from horror and hope.

“You,” Ed says simply. “Homework. Keep you busy.”

“Seriously, yo… you want me to, what? _Learn_ this?” he picks it up, frowns when he feels the heft of it and flicks to the first sheet of paper. “Ohmahgod. Did you _type_ this? With an honest-to-god, actual _typewriter_?” Ed had.

“People underestimate paper. Sometimes analogue is best. Can’t hack into it. Paper burns. I’ve got too much to do to hold your hand and tell it to you like a story. Read it.” Pinkman rifles through the pages, despair creeping into his face as he sees the sheer amount of detail. He shakes his head, tosses the file to the foot of the bed.

“I’m never going to remember all this. I’m fuck- sorry, screwed.”

“I’ve heard people swear before, you know.”

“Alright, _fucked._ Okay? You happy?” Pinkman drags his hands down his face. “Mr. White might have been able to remember something like this, but _me_? This is so far beyond me.”

“He never got a work-up like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Man was dying. Wasn’t no point.”

Silence follows as Pinkman absorbs what Ed’s said so bluntly, and what’s implied beneath his words. Ed doesn’t get on his case, berating him to _apply himself_. Doesn’t grumble about saving his skin, or stitching him up. He doesn’t guilt trip him by laying out the hours spent creating the ‘airtight life’ he promised, or mentioning the risk he takes on to do so.

 _Mr White was a dead man biding his time. There’s a point to you. You can_ live.

“Listen,” Ed says as he sits on the bed opposite. “The devil is in the details,” he points to the file, “and you cannot spend the years coming to you pretending that you have no past.”

“I know I have a past,” Pinkman hisses. “I’m not pretending I don’t have a past. All I’ve been doing down here is thinking about _my past_.”

“And that’s the way out of here is it? To latch onto Jesse Pinkman’s past? That’s your ticket?”

Pinkman shakes his head, voice simmering with anger. “You don’t get it.”

“That so? Go on; you tell me everything about what I don’t get.” All the years of Ed’s long life are apparent in that offer, all his experience, all he’s had to do to survive, and Pinkman understands this because he can only exhale in response. He’s tense, hands cradling the back of his neck, waiting for a jibe of some sort, for Ed to call him ungrateful, or an idiot, but the words don’t come. Ed waits too, and he has a deeper reserve of patience when it comes to enduring silences. 

He only stands when Pinkman uncurls himself, leans forward for the file, opens it and begins to read.

“Slow-cooked chicken stew today. I’ll bring it down in, what? An hour or so?”

“Sounds swell,” the kid says, more than a little petulantly. Ed’s halfway up the stairs when he hears Pinkman call out for him to wait.

“Look,” he says when Ed reappears, “I… appreciate everything. I know I pay you for this, but still. I appreciate all the…homecooked meals. They’re healthy and wholesome and like, really, really tasty.”

“I sense a _but.”_

“Can a man get some junk? Funyuns. Cheetos. _Please_. Anything. Just…agghh…” he rocks back in the bed, hands clenched fists. “I’m reading the thing, okay? If it’s not too much trouble, and you know I’m like, good for it.” He gestures to his duffle bag of money.

“You know what’s in that crap?”

“No, and I don’t care.” It’s the first time since that croaked out _Alaska_ that Pinkman has made a request, expressed a want. It may be for Funyuns but it’s a start.

“Read the thing; I’ll get your junk.”


	7. Optimist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A side-trip into Jesse's POV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm making hay while the sun shines (and the ideas are flowing).   
> Much angst below. Mentions of various character deaths etc. etc.

Six months in the pit.

A week in the Extractor’s basement.

Sixty hours in the back of a truck as it winds its way across Canada.

After the truck comes…years. _Years_ , Ed tells him. What fills those years are a blank, except for the hours, the days and weeks. Rinse and repeat. Start the cycle again. Months, weeks, days, hours. Any way he looks at it, he has time. And he waits. He’s gotten great at waiting.

Ed’s basement is not a concrete hole; it’s a Hyatt. A Ramada. A fucking Hilton. A Presidential suite complete with room service and the nation’s most expensive butler.

He’s grateful for the rhythm Ed brings to his days, three square meals appearing like clockwork, even when he isn’t awake when the old man descends the stairs. It’s routine enough to drown out the pulse of his heart which alternately beats to the tune of _you’re free you’re free you’re free_ or _dead dead dead dead_ at 100BMP.

He learns to look ahead with every dish Ed brings him. He relearns ‘anticipation’ as a positive concept. He starts thinking in the future tense. He eats food that has been cooked for him. Not fast food left-overs, not scraps, not Todd’s ‘rewards’ for a job well done in the meth lab he was literally chained to. Like a ham sandwich was incentive enough to not ruin a batch. A sufficient prize against lowering the quality of a cook just enough to get Todd squirming in the face of Lydia’s disappointment.

But it was incentive enough. Sometimes he really wanted the damn sandwich.

Ed hasn’t made him any sandwiches since he’s arrived. Some instinct that guy has.

_You’re free you’re free you’re free_

Jesse lies in the basement at night and compares the view of the ceiling with the view of the stars he had had in the pit. The ceiling is an improvement, but he finds in the dark of the night he can’t sleep without the sound of the tarp shifting and cracking in the breeze. There’s no breeze either, in the basement, and that’s an improvement too, those cold desert nights wreaking havoc on his joints. He’s going to be one of those old men who feel weather changes in their knees before he’s thirty.

In the night, his body remembers the hours spent shivering itself into unconsciousness, and his muscles contract automatically even when he’s warm.

He remembers mornings waking up to voices calling out to him, the rat, the rat in the cage. The laughter that followed, the footsteps, the ladder clattering down.

Don’t think about the ladder clattering down.

Don’t think about the slow climb up.

Don’t think about the faces, or the quick hands wielding lit cigarettes or jagged fragments of metal.

Don’t think about all the moments he wished he was…

_dead dead dead_

Dead-eyed Opie fuck Todd and Jack and the whole darn gang. _You’re dead, rat. You’re dead you’re dead._

They were the ones who were dead. Ripped to pieces in a hail of gunfire. Jesse remembers the disbelief in Todd’s voice, the little betrayed grunt as he wrapped his chains around Todd’s throat. The chains he once cursed and hated, had learned to tolerate, that were so quickly a part of him, and at the end, the chains he loved. Loved them so absolutely and without conditions as Todd struggled against them, fighting for breath. The chains which were on Jesse’s team now, bitch, loved and then abandoned, draped over Todd’s body and he was free.

_Totally Kafkaesque, isn’t it?_

He’d wanted to growl that into Todd’s ear but his teeth were clenched with the exertion of pulling the chain taut. Todd wouldn’t have gotten the beauty of it anyway. A wasted line, the dumb fuck. No, not dumb, Jesse concedes; shrewd, ruthless, methodical. Dangerous. Still a fuck.

Andrea would have appreciated the beauty of it; she would have been equally horrified and relieved, but she would have appreciated it all the same. She would have prayed for his soul despite everything because she was a good person. She would have been coldly satisfied at his suffering.

_Whose soul? Whose suffering? Todd’s? Or yours?_ a snarl in his head.

_Shut up_ , Jesse thinks in the vacuum store basement. _Shut. Up._

Jane would have appreciated the beauty of it even more; she would have been proud. She would have smiled and laughed and not been at all conflicted. She would have implored him to burn the whole place to the ground. She would have recognized the poetry of turning the thing that trapped Jesse into the instrument of his release. He remembers her smiles, how quickly they could turn from disdain to warmth. _You’re free, babe._

_And you’re dead you’re dead you’re dead_

Another morning.

Waking up to her lifeless eyes.

Don’t think about that.

Mr. White watching the life drain out of her while Jesse slept. Not Mr. White. Heisenberg.

Don’t think about that.

Heisenberg throwing himself at Jesse that night, the slight weight of him still enough to knock him over, strength enough to keep him pressed to the floor out of the range of the bullets. Not Heisenberg. Mr. White.

_You’re free you’re free you’re free_

You owe your freedom to the man who let Jane die. Who wanted you to know that, let it sink in, before he had you killed. Who led the Nazis to Andrea. Who poisoned Brock. Whose approval you still craved. Whose praise you still wanted. The man whose respect you still needed. Who tricked you and lied and lied and lied.

_He’s dead. No owing a debt to a dead man._

Ed’s voice cutting through the fog from somewhere. One of the mornings before the truck, when he’s caught in the liminal space between being two men and being neither. One of the mornings he’s physically in the basement but not _there_. Ed’s voice bringing him back to himself.

_No owing a debt to a dead man_. Words casually tossed out like he’s talking about a vacuum beyond repair. Matter of fact. No embellishments, no grand declarations. Not like Mr. White who liked to hold court, to lecture, to keep pressing the point because he wasn’t satisfied Jesse understood. No, Ed Galbraith is Cool Mr. Smooth.

Ed’s the only one left alive, of the men in his life, the potential role models. Aside from his father, who doesn’t really count, and Saul whoever he really was. A savvy survivalist behind a cartoon persona.

There’s some of Fring’s cold reserve in Ed. Ever the professional. Just a business man running an invisible empire built on crime. Jesse senses a ruthlessness there too, if it came down to it. He was on high alert with Fring though, never at ease, even when he was being groomed for… whatever. Like being in the employ of a shark.

Ed reminds him of Mike, the confidence with which he carries himself. The fact he’s got guys behind the scenes. Their closeness of age and turn of phrase, but there the similarities end. The air around Ed doesn’t thrum with the jaded, constant anger Mike gave off. He doesn’t speak with the world weariness and cynicism Mike did.

_You’ve got to be an optimist in this business_ , Ed told him one evening after he closed up the store. _Otherwise, what’s the point?_

_So, what like, get your clients a fresh start, a clean slate so they’ll go out and make the world a better place? Make up for all the shit they pulled that brought them to you in the first place?_

Ed shook his head. _There’s no fixing the shit that got pulled, as you say, but a man can believe they’ll stop pulling for good it if given a chance._

Jesse could never trust Fring. He could trust Mike. He thought he could trust Mr. White.

Ed says his word is his bond, and his actions, so far have given proof to that. So, Jesse will wait. He’ll memorize the details of his new life and when the time comes, he’ll climb into the back of the truck Ed showed him and let him deliver Jesse into his future.


	8. Into the System

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With apologies to Jon Krakauer for the (corrupted) chapter title.

_Ellis Driscoll was born on June 10 th, 1984. This makes him a Gemini_.

Jesse thinks the symbolism of this is a little on the nose. Ed tells him he needs to work within ‘the parameters’ and he didn’t organize the damn Zodiac.

 _Ellis was born in Ohio to Kathleen Stackhouse and Phillip James Driscoll, the only child of only children_.

Jesse thinks this sounds lonely, despite his own fraught relationship with Jake. Ed reasons an extended family would anchor Ellis, and Jesse needs him to be a man without attachments. A man who is easily on the move.

_After Ellis was born, the Driscolls moved to Nevada for three years, then New Jersey for five before settling in Wisconsin. His father worked as a claims adjuster. His mother was a housewife._

Jesse imagines the tire swing in his fictional front yard. His fictional mother, pushing him as high as he’ll go, his fictional father in a suit, warning them to be careful. His fake dad would’ve seen accidents everywhere, a side-effect of a career investigating insurance claims. His fake mom would’ve been more of a free-spirit, product of a childhood growing up rootless, roaming around the world as an army brat. They would’ve complimented each other. They would’ve been deeply in love.

_In November of 2004, his parents are killed in a car accident, T-boned at an intersection by a pick-up truck. The driver of the other vehicle dies at the scene. The autopsy reveals a blood alcohol concentration of 0.38. His mother is declared dead at the roadside, his father lingers in a coma for three weeks. Ellis survives. He is twenty._

Jesse finds this morbid. He’d rather his fictional parents were chilling in Florida, early retirees kicking back with midday cocktails.

‘Can’t they be, you know, alive?”

“Why don’t you talk to them? Why don’t they come see you?”

“None of your fucking business, jeez.”

“You’re right, but there are a lot of nosey people in this world who don’t know when to quit.” Ed sighs, the neutrality of his carefully arranged expression slipping for an instant as he taps a finger against his cheek and says, “You’re gonna have to prepare yourself for questions about these.” He means the scars.

Jesse has been trying very hard not to think about the scars. Now he does. He imagines the nosey people of the world asking how he got them. Ed reasons a car accident is prosaic, it’s believable. It’ll shut down probing. It’ll explain the melancholy air the kid will carry with him. Having a prepared backstory is armour, it means the kid won’t have to improvise. He won’t fumble or freeze. He won’t get caught out as long as he sticks to it.

_The life insurance pay-out is generous and the hospital bills are high. In the new year, Ellis ups sticks to New Orleans where he works in a bar until Katrina sweeps it away._

Jesse thinks Ellis could use a god-damn break at this point. Ed says it’s cleaner; a lot of records were lost in the hurricane. Should anyone look deeper, it’s a good place for the trail to go cold.

 _After that it was Idaho. He was a waiter in Boise until 2008 and the restaurant went under. Then it was odd jobs, cash-in hand gigs, part time, temp, whatever he could scrape, working his way across to Nevada to a landscaping job until that went under too. Another victim of the Great Recession_.

It’s up to Jesse to explain why Ellis is drawn to Alaska. Could be boyhood fantasy, a picture he saw one time in a _National Geographic_ that lodged in his head. Ed knows Alaskans are used to hard-done-by romantic types popping up in their small towns and backwaters. They arrive from the Lower 48 with delusions of living off the land, fulfilling some Jack London, _Call of the Wild_ daydream and who leave in a flash when the reality of the cold sets in. Ed reckons they’ll look at Ellis Driscoll and chalk him up as another dreamer, one who has seen the rougher side of life maybe, but a dreamer nonetheless. One of a dozen in that vast land.

Jesse has been given a _Lonely Planet_ guide. Ed intends for him to get to know placenames and history; experience has taught him the value of name-dropping a watering hole or two, giving the impression of knowledge of places never actually visited. It puts the locals at ease. It’s good camouflage.

Jesse decides Ellis keeps himself to himself. His interactions with the locals are non-existent.

_Ellis likes the high, shattered mountains, the wind, the cold rarefied air. He likes to be alone._

The address on his new driver’s license is a small studio apartment above a mechanic’s shop just on the outskirts of Haines. The apartment doesn’t actually exist, but it’s enough to get Ellis Driscoll into the system. Ed has a guy to do that kind of thing, apparently. The license is what Ed refers to as a ‘genuine fake’. When it expires, he can get a new one through the DMV like any other legitimate citizen, such is the old man’s wizardry.

Jesse will have a car when he gets north, Ed has said. He can settle in Haines if he wants, or head down the Panhandle. He can settle into the interior, he has choices. Jesse turns that verb over: _settle_. It’s a deliberate attempt on Ed’s part to convey calm. Jesse has picked up on the horse-whisperer vibe Ed gives off when he speaks to him. Nice, even tones. The careful phrasing of a cautious man.

Jesse wants to settle. He remembers a time with Mike by the river, not long after Drew Sharp was killed. Alaska was where Mike would go, if he had Jesse’s youth. Jesse could see himself there, knee deep in snow, breath curling out of him. He saw a whole new life play out in the ripples of that New Mexico river. And then the pit happened and the visions died.

_Ellis sits on the front steps of his house, looking up at the Northern Lights. Ellis drives down a highway at sunset, snow-capped peaks in the distance rosy orange. Ellis spies an eagle in a pine-tree and watches it lift off, fly away._

The pit is behind him now, and what stretches ahead are mountain crags and dark, deep forests.


	9. The Narrow Road to the Deep North

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With apologies to Basho for the chapter title.  
> Also to Idris Muhammed whose album 'Turn This Mutha Out' (1977:Kudu) is what Ed's listening to on the drive. Lyrics referenced are from 'Could Heaven Ever Be Like This?'. For a truly immersive experience, give it a listen.

Pinkman is awake and dressed on the morning of their departure. He’s trying to look resolute, eyes hard, jaw and shoulders set. He’s getting into character.

Ed does a walkthrough of the basement, makes sure nothing incriminating has been left behind. The bloodstained mattress he removed the night before, outsourced the destruction of it to a guy he trusts not to ask questions. In the bathroom, the towel isn’t lying in the puddle as usual; Pinkman has hung it up. He raises his eyebrows at the kid.

“Day’s a-wastin’ and your chariot awaits,” he says. Pinkman walks out of the basement ahead of him and doesn’t look back.

Ed has explained the set up he’ll have Pinkman in on the drive up the country, warned him that it’ll be a tight fit and an uncomfortable ride, and now, at 7am, they stand before the moving truck. The back is filled with shabby looking furniture and a couple of rolled up rugs that Ed shifts to the side to reveal the compartment Pinkman will hide in. There’s a heater, a camping lamp, a thin roll of foam to cushion him from the metal.

“What about… like… food?”

Ed coughs. “It’s…uh…better you went up on an empty stomach.”

“ _Eww_. Yeah, okay. Point taken.”

“Water though. A couple bottles. Won’t be making any pit-stops though, so…uh…if you got to-”

“ _Yeah,_ you can just… stop…there. _Jeeesus_ ,” Pinkman draws out the syllables. “Wow. Quarter of a million and you’ve got me pissing in a bottle. Nice. Real classy, yo.” He sighs, shudders and then gives Ed a direct look. “Is this…where you stashed Mr. White?”

“No.”

“But…uh… did he have to…”

“I didn’t make a study of the man’s toilet habits, but no. I didn’t make any pit-stops for him either. Now,” he gestures to the compartment, “if you don’t mind.”

Pinkman looks darkly pleased. “Oh, he must have fucking _loved_ that,” he mutters as he climbs in. He shifts on his back, uses one of his bags as a pillow. Ed points out the lever he’ll use to open the cover from the inside.

“Ready?”

The kid exhales.

“Let’s fucking go.”

~

It’s a beautiful drive out of New Mexico. The traffic is light, the sun slides between clouds, casting shifting light over the hills. For the first three hours Ed drives in silence up the highway, on the lookout for any police cruisers or state-troopers pulling into view in his wing mirrors. He’d been listening in on the scanner back in the shop and following the news every night in the run-up to this journey. General consensus is Pinkman has made it into Mexico after a car was found on the border. There’s been speculation about him getting picked up by coyotes, or nabbed by a cartel.

The compound shoot out was leading news for three days, then came the reveal that the bodies of Agents Schrader and Gomez had been found, which swung press interest away from Pinkman’s whereabouts and onto an analysis of the White/Schrader family dynamics _. Sensationalism_ , Ed thinks. Hard on the people left alive, to be dissected and discussed, but Pinkman hasn’t been mentioned at all for two days and that sets Ed more at ease. It tells him the DEA is at a loss; his trail has run cold.

In Alamosa he stops for gas and coffee, knocks a sequence on the metal by his head. Pinkman knocks back the way Ed taught him, the sound faint and muffled: _all good_. The flat basin of desert begins to give way to mountains and greenery. He turns on the radio. They are ten hours away from Casper.

Ed takes rutted back-country roads which makes for a longer drive, but he wants to stay away from the big cities, the larger towns. The roads here are less cared for than the expressways, but quieter. Trucks pass him loaded with cattle, an occasional trailer with horses, pick-ups. The mountains creep closer to the road the further north he goes. At noon, he pulls into a truck stop for a burger to go. He eats it in the cab of his truck, listening to a religious programme, the only station he can get clearly, hoping they segue into music from the fire and brimstone preaching. When they don’t, he switches it off and drives on.

There’s no CD player in the truck, only a tape deck and Ed has a collection of cassettes he keeps in a shoe box in the passenger seat. It’s too far away to reach without jerking the wheel, so he takes his chances with whatever’s currently installed in the player. The rolling drums of the opening song tell him it’s Idris Muhammad. He likes energetic music, to keep him alert on long drives. Funk, jazz, rock. Songs he first heard when he was a much younger man.

_I feel music in your eyes  
Rainbows in your kiss_

Ed hums along, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

Clouds amass on the horizon.

_Gonna get over  
Got to get over_

The sun disappears. Raindrops hit the windshield, so light and scattered Ed doesn’t bother to turn on the wipers. It doesn’t start in earnest until they’ve reached Breckenridge. Ed feels a change in the air, a sudden drop of temperature. Casper is still five and a half hours away.

Just south of Frisco, the quality of the rain changes. It becomes thick and slushy. Ed turns the wipers up a notch and then the hail comes. A sudden squall of thick, round ice bouncing off the windshield. The traffic has slowed to a crawl and Ed watches the dark sky apprehensively, then clocks a turn-off that leads to a park and a thin straggle of trees. He turns off the main road, parks in the lee, hoping doing so gives a little protection to the glass; the last thing he needs is a cracked windshield. A few other cars have followed his example and pulled into the campground parking lot, stopping a distance away.

The Idris Muhammed album has drawn to a close, but Ed doesn’t switch to the radio; instead he sits in silence as the hail intensifies. He listens to it rattling and ricocheting off the metal roof of the truck.

 _A right god-damn racket_ , he thinks. It reminds him of gunfire.

The second the thought forms, he hears it- an irregular clunking, a high keening, coming from the compartment Pinkman is in. Ed’s body moves faster than his mind, because he’s out of the cab with his coat over his head, making for the back of the truck. His hands are cold and clumsy as he fiddles with the lock and lever, hail pelting his back, his arms. The worst of the weather has passed, but the hailstones sting through his padded coat. He opens the back just enough to slide through, leaves a crack at the bottom for light and he spots Pinkman in the gloom, half-way out of his hiding place, the sound coming from him desperate and animal.

“Easy,” Ed says softly as the kid rolls out, sprawling into a space between the furniture. He walks up slowly, hands out. Pinkman is gone from behind his eyes, somewhere in memory or nightmare and he sees Ed, but doesn’t _see_ him. Clocks him only as a threat.

He swings out a fist, wildly, and stumbles. Ed catches him by the wrist and uses his momentum to jerk him further off balance, hooks his foot around an ankle and Pinkman crashes to his knees. Ed’s behind him now, sinking his weight onto his back, one hand pushing his head towards the metal floor, the other keeping the arm he caught bent at an angle. Pinkman is too surprised to resist; the fall forward knocks the wind out of him. The arm Ed doesn’t have a grasp on is trapped, immobile between the floor and his chest. He’s flat out, pinned. Pinkman’s feet search for purchase, scrabbling and kicking against the furniture. Ed presses his knee into Pinkman’s back and gets a grunt of pain in response.

“Stop that,” Ed’s voice is firm but not unkind. He’s careful not to put too much pressure on Pinkman’s wounded side. “Remember where you are.”

“ _Fuck_ _you_ ,” the kid gasps. “ _Fuck all of you.”_

“Ain’t nobody here but me and you.”

“ _Jack…please…”_

“Not my name. You know it.”

_“No…”_

“C’mon.”

Pinkman’s thrashing grows weaker. He lies under Ed, panting heavily, breathing through gritted teeth. He screws his eyes shut and an anguished groan breaks out of him. His whole body is ridged with trembling and Ed loosens his grip slightly, shifts the hand on his head to his shoulder.

“You’re not there no more.”

Outside, the sound of the hail eases into silence. Pinkman is sobbing in earnest now, limp and shaking with exhaustion. Ed takes hold of his shoulders and hoists him into a sitting position, propped against a chest of drawers. He crouches and inspects him in the dim light. Pinkman won’t meet his eyes, but Ed can see he’s present again, despite the panic, despite the grief.

Pinkman is hyperventilating, breath ragged and his skin drained of colour. His hands grip Ed’s coat lapels, fabric balled up in his white-knuckled fists. Ed takes one of his hands by the wrist and guides it up to his own chest.

“Keep time with me, now,” and he breathes deeply. In and out. His heartbeat reverberates against Pinkman’s palm, slow and steady. Minutes pass and gradually Pinkman’s breathing evens. Ed murmurs encouragement.

“Good. You’re doin’ good.”

Deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. Pinkman rests his forehead on his knees, scrubs his free hand over his head. Tears are still streaming down his cheeks but he’s calmer now. More in control. Ed lets go of his wrist and Pinkman looks up.

“I’m sorry.”

Ed sighs, gives him a half-shake of the head. “Don’t warrant an apology, but…” he hesitates, choosing his words carefully.

“But it can’t happen again,” Pinkman finishes for him.

“No. It can’t.” Ed’s aware of the possibility he may have been seen bolting to the back of his truck in the middle of a hailstorm. The sounds that might have escaped and the curious ears and eyes that might have listened and looked. Ed fishes around the inner pocket of his coat.

“Under the circumstances, I think you better take this.” He withdraws a prescription container and shakes out a couple of pills into Pinkman’s hand. “Lorazepam,” he says in response to the kid’s hesitation. “We’re still five hours and change from Casper and I need you back in that.” He points to the compartment.

“Okay.”

“Five hours and you’re out again.”

Pinkman nods, steeling himself. He swallows the pills dry. “Okay.”

Ed slings an arm around his shoulders, helping the kid stand. Pinkman steadies himself against the furniture, sways slightly before lifting himself into the hiding place. He rolls from his side to his stomach and Ed watches him for a moment.

“Alright?”

Pinkman nods. “Yeah, alright.” He’s still shaking. Ed unzips one of the kid’s duffle bags and rummages through it until he finds another of the coats he picked up at the Goodwill. Pinkman is already wearing the warmest one, but he arranges the second over him without a word.

He shuts up the plate and moves the carpets back underneath. Outside he closes and locks the back of the truck before letting out a long shuddering breath. The cars which followed him into the turn-off to wait out the hail are gone. There’s a family checking out an information board on the other side of the parking lot, but they don’t look Ed’s way. Nothing sets Ed’s alarm bells off. Nothing awry.

He braces his hands against his knees for a moment. The ground is littered with semi-melted hailstones. The roads are going be shit.

He sighs and straightens, turning it into a stretch and shaking out his arms. He takes his phone out of his pocket and checks the time. He’s an hour behind schedule and there’s no reception to send a text to his man in Wyoming.

“Well,” he says to the air. The clouds have dispersed and the sky is a patchy mix of grey and blue. As he climbs back into the driver’s seat, his mind drifts back to that morning. What was it the kid said?

 _Let’s fucking go_.

 _Alright_ , thinks Ed. _Let’s fucking go_.

He switches on the tape deck and turns his truck north. 


	10. Deft Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original character popping up here, one of Ed's 'guys behind the scenes'. He kind of wandered into my head fully formed, demanding to be part of the story and he's a great (imho) foil to Ed's stoic-straight man persona. I'll be exploring their history in a bit more depth in later chapters.  
> I also kind of belatedly realized 'Casper' is a mattress brand... that's a coincidence here. No affiliation etc etc.  
> I also [REDACTED] the name of the actor who I had previously mentioned I used as a physical basis- mostly becasue I didn't want it to be too prescriptive. I borrowed some elements of this dude's face, but I think Cas has evolved somewhat since then. If you're curious, he still gets a mention in the comments.

There’s a figure waiting by the gated back entrance of _Casper Quality Mattress_ as Ed pulls up. The beam of the headlights reveals a long, lean face in counterpoint to the cragginess of Ed’s own. A man who looks to be in his early forties, black hair threaded with silver, and round wire-framed glasses that reflect the light, hiding his eyes. His mouth is quirked up at the corners, and he raises a hand in greeting then points to where Ed should drive his truck. Ed backs up into a delivery bay and the man swings the gate shut, secures it with a heavy chain and padlock and jogs over, so full of pep and bounce Ed feels twice his age.

“Good to see you made it up in one-piece, old man.” The eyes behind the glasses shine with wry amusement.

“Easy does it, young buck,” Ed groans as he climbs down from his seat. They shake hands and the Wyoming man, Casimir – Cas - claps a hand on Ed’s shoulder, giving him a wide grin of genuine affection.

“I told you to make yourself scarce.” Ed doesn’t like Cas crossing paths with his clients; for all the paperwork he forges, it’s a strictly hands-off job.

“Yeah, only sixteen times,” Casimir says. “You know you need an even twenty to get it to stick. So, sue me. I’m curious.”

“That can be fatal I hear.”

“For cats; good thing I am not a cat. I’ve got dim sum in the back. Hungry?”

“As long as you didn’t cook it,” Ed replies. Casimir could boil an egg for an hour and it would still turn out raw.

“It’s nice and cold. Picked it up almost two hours ago. You could’ve had it hot if you were on time. Had to detour?”

Ed knows Pinkman can’t hear him but he lowers his voice anyway. “Cargo was… got a little spooked in the box.”

“Ah. Bad?”

“When’s it good?”

Casimir gives a sympathetic click of his tongue as Ed recounts what happened. “You keeping him in the box the whole way up?” That would be the safest option, and Ed is a stickler for safety, but he’s been asking himself the same question since before Colorado. The photographs of Pinkman in circulation bear such scant resemblance to the man in the back of his truck, and the Canadians aren’t going to be on high-alert for an American POI everyone thinks is in Mexico. But Ed knows as soon as his guard drops, danger appears.

There’s something more to Casimir’s questions than idle curiosity; he’s present, looking at Ed, but the clench of his jaw tells Ed that he’s nearly twenty years in the past, remembering his own trip into a new life. “You made concessions for me,” Casimir reminds him. “Sunlight and air.”

“He’s not a plant.”

“Neither was I.”

“It’s what you needed.”

“And this kid?”

“He’s less of a kid than you were,” Ed replies, though in truth, Cas had a maturity then that made him older than his years. A maturity that Pinkman didn’t have when he first arrived at Ed’s shop, but one that has been slowly and quietly blooming within him.

Casimir isn’t deterred. “He’s going to need acclimating.”

“Is he now.”

“Trust me. I’ve been reading the news.” Casimir means the compound pit. “Long time to be down there, alone with one’s thoughts, and how many faces has he seen after getting out? How many normal day-to-day interactions? You’re going to turn this kid loose after a _week_ in the box? After everything that came before it?”

“I’m not his therapist…”

“'Or his priest.’” Cas finishes for him, having heard the same line countless times over the years.

Ed sighs. He isn’t a man with much in the way of vanity, but he does pride himself on his detachment, his professional remoteness. He has two rules for himself: don’t get caught, and don’t get involved. He wouldn’t have made it to the age he is now if he had taken every sob story to heart.

And then, Casimir, the outlier. Whisked out of a war-zone in ‘93, pro-bono. The direst case Ed had seen and seventeen years later he’s still involved.

“There’s no question of it when we’re crossing the borders, but once we get clear of Calgary…”

Casimir holds his hands up in surrender. “It’s your call,” he says, but he figures the seed has taken root and he can’t help smiling in victory. “You’ve put a lot of detail into this one; I’d hate for it to go to waste.”

“He reminds me of you,” Ed says dryly.

“Oh? Debonair and devilishly handsome?”

“A young punk, but there’s hope yet. Let’s get him out.”

Ed nods his head towards the truck and Cas unlocks the back, levers it open.

Ed walks to the back, shifts the carpets out of the way and bangs on the metal plate. There’s a long enough delay he feels the need to bang again, harder, and only then does the plate swing down, revealing Pinkman, pale and breathing heavily. His eyes land briefly on Ed, then flit up to Cas behind him, anxiety filling them before Ed can make reassurances of safety.

“Who’s that?” Pinkman whispers.

“Nobody you got to be concerned about.” Pinkman is trembling as he climbs out of the box and Ed takes hold of his arm to steady him.

“I hope you like cold Chinese,” Cas extends his arms in a little _after you_ flourish as they exit the truck.

The lighting in the mattress store is dim, and Pinkman lets himself be propped up by Ed as they follow Casimir across the showroom floor to a more brightly lit break room. There’s a round table that takes up most of the space, and Ed eases Pinkman into a chair while he rubs his eyes, squinting against the glare of the fluorescent lights. Casimir takes styrofoam boxes out of a plastic bag, rustling up a trio of mis-matched forks out of a drawer. He reaches into a cabinet and withdraws a half empty (or full, depending on your outlook) bottle of bourbon. He gives it a little shake and waggles his eyebrows, the mischievous streak that has been the cause of so many of Ed’s headaches as alive as it had been in his twenties.

“Go on then,” Ed says, nodding his head at Pinkman who seems to have been waiting for permission to eat. Casimir pours out generous fingers into three plastic cups and knocks his back with a “ _Na zdrowie_ _”._

Pinkman seems thrown by Casimir, his affability unexpected after a day spent fighting to overcome whatever he’d been feeling in the back of the truck. Ed can see he’s wary from the way his eyes flick between the two of them, to the forks and chopsticks on the table, that instinct to look for ways to defend himself strong as ever.

Cas notices too and positions himself against the wall closest to Ed, the older man acting as a buffer between them- Pinkman’s safety net- no sudden movements to set the kid into a panic. He seems to ignore him, making chit-chat with Ed about the weather, tactfully keeping it local to Casper and avoiding questions about the drive up; he talks about his man at the Canadian-US border who will see them through, no trouble at all, on Tuesday morning. He talks about mattress models, about the legitimate end of his business; Cas creates a wall of sound, knowing from experience it’s not so much the content of his speech but the cadence that matters and eventually Pinkman’s shoulders come down from around his ears and he eats with more gusto, shovelling forkfuls of rice into his mouth. Ed slides his portion of _siumaai_ across the table and Pinkman tucks into that as well. Ed sips his bourbon thoughtfully.

There’s no secret hideout in the mattress store; Cas has moved a single mattress out of his stock onto the floor of his windowless back office, which is safe enough for one night.

“Top of the range, that,” Cas tells Pinkman. It’s still wrapped in plastic but there are sheets, blankets. “Most comfortable night of your life. Guaranteed.”

Pinkman takes stock of his surroundings. There’s a tiny bathroom attached to the office, a toilet, a sink.

“Sunday tomorrow, so we’re shut,” Cas continues. Pinkman sits on the mattress, gives the tiniest of bounces. The shrink-wrap crinkles under him. “Nobody will be coming by.” 

“I’ll be wanting to get underway at about eight or so,” Ed adds. Pinkman nods. “Take it easy then.” He turns to go.

“So, where-” Pinkman begins. Ed jerks his thumb at Casimir.

“He’s putting me up.” Pinkman’s eyes are like saucers. Ed gazes at him, levelly. “Ain’t nothing to worry about now. You’re underway.”

“Alright. Yeah. Okay.”

“Rest up.”

Casimir has been working a key loose from a ring he’s pulled from his back pocket. He puts it on the desk. “That’s… um….it’s for the door. Lock it, if you want, and in the morning I’ll get it back off you.” He smiles a _goodnight_ and pulls the office door to, exchanges a look with Ed when he hears the click of the locking mechanism as they move down the hallway.

“Don’t start.” Ed says as Casimir lets out a low whistle.

“Sure, yeah. You’re not his priest, you’re his exorcist.”

“Cas…”

“Demons up to here.” Casimir sighs heavily. “You know it. That’s why you’re taking him up to the house.”

Ed says nothing but he seems mighty interested in the ceiling.

“Ah, okay. You _are_ taking him up there. I knew it.” Cas continues. “Risky, risky, risky taking him up to your personal bolt-hole.” They’ve reached the delivery bay.

“It’s convenient.”

“Like hell.”

“It’s _en route_.”

“He’s got to you.”

Cas locks the warehouse doors and leads Ed to his pickup truck.

“Deft touch with the keys,” Ed tells him as they click their seatbelts into place and Cas reverses the pickup. “Putting him at ease like that.”

“You think? I-” Cas slams on the brakes. “Oh, you bastard.”

“Easy now.”

“You Machiavellian fuck,” he laughs. “You want me to talk to him.”

“I never want you to talk to them.”

“Of course not. You have rules. Which is why you’re not asking now. You just… want me to want to talk to him.”

“Nope.”

“No, not asking. Just letting me stew in the idea. Jesus Christ,” Cas sighs through his hands. “You _Inception_ -ed me.”

“Come again?” 

“Nothing.” Cas drives down Casper’s main street. It’s quiet for a Saturday night. “What exactly am I meant to be saying to this kid?” he asks after a spell.

Ed is thoughtful. “I don’t rightly know. Past week I thought he was doing alright, but now-” he moves his hand in an upward trajectory, then mimes a cliff edge, a swift curve down.

“Perhaps it’s not the message that needs changing, just the messenger.” He turns to Casimir. “All bullshit aside, if you don’t-“

“No, I’m in,” Cas interrupts. “You’re not that good a puppet-master, you know. I still have autonomy. I was making plans over Chinese to leave you keys to the jeep and a note in the morning.” He chuckles as he pulls up to the driveway of his house.

“‘ _He reminds me of you_.’ So fucking transparent. You _could_ have just asked, you know?”

Ed scoffs. “You’d have never let me hear the end of it.” Seventeen years of intoning _don’t get involved_ down the drain. “Couldn’t give you the pleasure.” Ed looks about as amused as he gets.

“Yeah, don’t think you’ve gotten away with it now, old man,” Cas parks and switches off the ignition. “But I’ll see to your rescue puppy.”


	11. Casimir Effect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story behind Ed's man in Casper, Wyoming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had to kill my darlings over and over which is why it's taken as long as it has. Here's the nth draft. Lots of heavy feelings, man, in this one. Chapter was becoming a baroque nightmare so I've tried to split it and it shouldn't be all that long before the next half goes up.   
> Some Polish words and phrases:  
>  Ja pierdolę- fuck me! as an exclaimation of surprise, not a demand. Don't get excited.   
> Zuchwały- saucy, in the naughty sense, but there's more context there. Again, don't get excited.
> 
> Also have fun trying to pronouncing them. I certainly did.   
> With chapter title apologies to Hendrik Casimir.

Casimir usually sleeps better when Ed is proximate, so deeply does he associate him with safety. But sleep doesn’t come. He’s restless in body as well as mind. He’s beginning to regret his bravado earlier, the easy way he committed to talking to Pinkman. He’s starting to realise what such a conversation will entail.

It’s always been a fault of his. To leap before he looks. It’s one of the things that got him into trouble all those years ago in Sarajevo.

Cas sighs and rolls over. He doesn’t want to think about Sarajevo.

The minutes tick on. The memories come anyway.

Quarter past midnight. He flips to his stomach.

_Walking back from mass in the winter. The smell of incense in his clothes. Snow. Light._

One A.M. Turns the pillow over to the cold side.

_His parents in the kitchen, table piled with books and papers. The ache in his stomach when they look at each other and smile._

Twenty to two. Rolls onto his back.

_The shelling. Fires in the night._

At ten past two he rises, defeated and cursing. He knows it’s too early to be going over to the store, but his head is churning and the only remedy is movement.

He dresses with the lights off, opts for dark flannel check in blue, grey and red. Glasses. Yesterday’s jeans. His boots he picks up and carries to the kitchen, padding past the spare room where Ed is sleeping. He leaves the keys to the pick-up on the counter, as he said he would, drops them on top of the papers he and Ed had been looking through just a few hours earlier.

Mr. Driscoll’s paperwork.

Cas tells himself he’s not going to the mattress store. The ‘encouraging conversation’ or whatever should take place in daylight. _Not like Pinkman is going to be awake at this hour anyway_ , he thinks.

He hesitates. He sighs. He runs a hand through his hair.

He gathers the papers.

He slips them into a manila envelope and shoves it into his coat’s inner pocket and heads out the door.

~

Casimir likes Casper best at night, when he can appreciate how safe it is, how still. He likes the way familiar places take on a strange effect in the darkness. This night is brisk, cloudless; there are myriad stars. He can see his breath in the air and even though he’s turning forty next year, he can’t resist the urge to exhale like a dragon blowing smoke.

He often gives in to this boyish streak; his strides are long. He hums and whistles. He kicks rocks down the street to see how far they’ll go. He feels most himself when he’s alone.

Casimir doesn’t know where the lightness in him comes from, but he relies on it to see him through his darker moments. Ed is the only person he unfurls this side of himself for.

Joe, as he’s known as in Casper, has a reputation for being a serious man, quiet, and, well, a little eccentric. Joe goes walking in every kind of unseasonable weather. His employees stopped offering him rides long ago, knowing he’ll politely decline and go back to ploughing his own path through the snow-drifts.

Joe keeps himself to himself. He doesn’t interact much with the locals outside of his employees at the mattress store. It’s a little hard to place his accent; some think he’s from Minnesota originally, maybe Maine. They think he wants a simple life after a brief stint in the Balkans or someplace. Peacekeeping, Blue Beret. Honourable discharge after a fire, or a jet crash or a tank exploded. They reason a person can’t go through something like that without getting a few screws knocked loose.

Nobody is quite sure what the story is, but because they know Joe to be a decent boss, a nice guy, they don’t enquire too much. They all think he’s older than he is.

~

It was complex, where he was from. Borders moved. Nationalities dissolved. Kingdoms and governments rose and fell. Casimir’s idea of who he was couldn’t easily be catalogued by a line in a passport. He’d grown up in a tangle of languages. His mother had been Polish, his father Hungarian, and they along with Casimir had been born in Yugoslavia, as it was at the time. Sarajevo. For many years, he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

When he needed to feel capable, he would ride the cable car up into the surrounding mountains and look across the spread of rooftops and domes and spires in the city below, the streets so full of potential and vitality which he felt echoed in his own blood. It was a messy, complicated place. It was beautiful and ugly and it was supposed to be the setting of his future, not solely his past.

Then the war came.

He’s been in America for seventeen years. He’s been in Casper for ten. In his more stoic moments, he reasons it’s not so surprising. He comes from a long line of people displaced, through choice, or otherwise. Casper is as good a place as any to settle.

~

Casimir walks past the cinema where _Inception_ has been playing for two months now. He’s seen it twice. He doesn’t usually go for action, but this one had Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it so he made an exception. Another of Joe’s peculiarities, his penchant for rom-coms over violence. He just doesn’t have the stomach for it.

He stops to inspect the posters for upcoming releases: there’s a sequel to _Wall Street_ on the way, and Casimir remembers watching the original on a bootleg VHS dubbed into Czech- he had’t been a fan; the other poster is for _The Social Network_ and he sighs, momentarily reminded of the many frustrating hours Ed has had him scrub clients’ social media accounts over the last few years. He can’t believe what people share online. He doesn’t have Facebook. Not wise given his line of work.

_Because work is the issue_ , says the voice in his head, _not your lack of friends_. He tries to ignore the voice in his head.

He checks tomorrow’s starts for _Inception_ , figures he can go see it a third time. Sitting in the dark with some popcorn, he might even fall asleep.

The good people of the mattress store would be surprised to learn their boss had wanted to be an actor once, and not for the first time Casimir considers how, in a way, he got his wish.

~

His parents didn’t support the idea. They tried to steer him into their own passions, into history and language until there had been no room for his own. They found the parts of him they didn’t see in themselves hard to love; they never said it, but Cas had known. There had been a great deal his parents hadn’t seen.

They had both worked at the University’s Oriental Institute, preserving manuscripts, translating works. They had been dedicated- _obsessed_ , Casimir realised when he was older. They had cared more for the deeds of dead men than the thoughts of their only living son. Their idea of a well rounded up-bringing involved more medieval texts and Persian grammar than playdates; and an ability to recite 18th Century Ottoman poetry in the original Turkish didn’t win him any friends in the schoolyard.

Though it did, Cas has to concede, give him a good ear for tempo and meter that later developed into a talent for accents- a talent that has come in useful in ways he’d not imagined when he was seven.

But Cas had spent his life on the fringes of their affection; he’d been diminished, dismissed. He had been lonely.

And so, a solitary childhood passed into a solitary adolescence. He learned to tread lightly around his desires.

Living a lie had been good practice for his present.

~

But it hadn’t always been that way. There had been five years of truth between Sarajevo and Casper.

_Oh_ , Cas thinks, _there you are_.

He braces himself against the memories.

From 1994 to 1999, in the warmth of San Francisco, there had been Marcus.

Marcus, who called him by his real name, and not an alias; who knew all the parts of him and never flinched in the looking.

Marcus, who had already been living with HIV for six years when Cas met him.

Marcus, who was in the world so briefly but so brightly, like a firework exploding the long night-time of Casimir’s life.

Cas has to stop for a moment when he thinks of Marcus, and wait for the squeeze in his chest to pass. It does, slowly.

He walks on.

~

It’s just after three when he reaches the mattress store, _his_ store. Even after ten years, Casimir is surprised at his business acumen. It’s actually successful under its own steam, all his extra-curricular activities aside.

Ed had helped him set it up as a front after Marcus died, when he could see Cas was on a precipice. _You need something to do, and I could use a guy with your technical skills_.

Ed, with all his illegal dealings, has a funny idea of what helps keep a person out of trouble.

_It’s the only thing I know how to do_ , he had told him once, in response to Casimir’s questions about the path his life had taken. _And I’m good at it. I should have gone freelance long ago._

Ed’s appearance in his life is like a knife, cutting it into two distinct parts. His memories of the months he spent suffering at the hands of other men have fogged over. But he remembers clearly the first time he saw Ed.

~

Early on, he would try and track back to last moment he could have done something differently. Turning left on that particular street, waking up just five minutes earlier, exiting a room just a little bit faster. If only he’d looked away _then_ , hadn’t said _that_ he wouldn’t be _here_. He figured it a kind of alchemy, a formula that if he cracked, he would be transported to the precise moment in time his path diverged and he could make a different choice.

But the days became weeks became months upon months and gradually the only _when_ that mattered was that of pain; when it would come, when it would stop. He knew he was dying and he welcomed it.

A day came. New faces had joined the old and Casimir had been defiant. He had wanted to go out fighting. Someone had finally pushed the muzzle of a rifle to his temple, intent on pulling the trigger, when Ed stepped out of the shadowy corners of his vision and said, _don’t waste the bullet_.

His face had been an impassive mask. Casimir had hated him, thought him cruel.

Then there had been chaos, shouts, the sound of gunfire. Then darkness, the sensation of movement, of pain bracketed with apologies, of a voice speaking to him to soothe rather than humiliate. When he came to, three days had passed and with his one good eye, he had seen Ed’s face hovering above him, no longer a mask, but full of sorrow. 

Cas had thought himself dead, in some kind of purgatory, but he discovered he was on a cargo ship powering out of the Adriatic and, eventually, onto America. The captain owed Ed a favour or two, he said in reply to Casimir’s _why_ ? during the second week at sea. It was the first time Cas had spoken since Sarajevo.

_Not ‘why-the-ship’._

Ed didn’t know Cas, he’d been pulp, a stranger. In great distress, yes, but not Ed’s responsibility. It was clear that he’d burned some bridges preventing Casimir’s death, allusions to a life he could not go back to.

_Why save me?_

And Ed had told him something of the accumulation of days lived and done and witnessed that had been chipping away at his humanity for the last thirty-three years. Ed had seen Casimir and felt nothing. And that had been enough to do something.

Casimir hadn’t been the line in the sand, but the realisation the line had been erased long before.

_Because,_ Ed had told him, _if there is such a thing as a soul, it felt like the last chance I had to keep whatever’s left of mine intact._

Four weeks later they arrived in Baltimore, on a day that would have been Casimir’s twenty-second birthday, though he had a new birthday by then, a new name.

_~_

A shiver brings Cas back to the present. He feels the cold now that he’s stopped walking, and he’s tired; the memories have worn him out.

He fishes his keys out of his pocket, annoyed with himself for coming here so early. The walk was meant to help him get his thoughts in order, but now he only feels dislocated. He should turn around and go home, get some sleep and be fresh for the morning.

Or he could sit on the couch in the breakroom and finish off the bourbon.

_Give strong drink unto him who is ready to perish_ , he thinks. _No contest_.

He unlocks the door and steps into the gloom, mattresses glowing white like a sea of icebergs. His glasses fog up with the change of temperature so he wipes them clean on his shirt as he approaches the breakroom.

He flicks on the light and three things happen simultaneously:

Pinkman, illuminated across the room, hisses, _“Holy shit!”_

Casimir gasps, “ _Ja pierdolę_!”

And the glass Pinkman has been drinking from slips from his hand and smashes to the floor.

His fear turns to fury as he recognises Cas.

“Yo, what the _fuck_ , bitch?”

They’re both panting for breath, with a hand over their hearts.

“You told me no one would be here! _Jeeee-ssssuuuuusss._ I think I fucking _shit_ myself.”

It’s the most Cas has heard him say since he arrived. He looks at the floor. The shards of glass are practically invisible against the pattern of the laminate tiles and Pinkman, still in yesterday’s clothes, isn’t wearing shoes.

“You should get on the chair.” Cas pulls paper towel from the dispenser.

“The fuck?”

“Your feet,” Cas points and sees Pinkman register the mine-field of glass that now surrounds him. He hoists himself onto the edge of the sink instead, wobbles like he’s about to fall into the basin, catches himself. Cas pretends he didn’t notice, tries to keep a straight face as he sweeps the glass into a pile with his boot.

“What are you doing here?” Pinkman’s voice is a growl.

Cas crouches to gather the larger fragments of glass, holds them delicately in his palm.

“I couldn’t sleep. I walk, sometimes, when it happens.”

“Walking,” he sounds incredulous.

“Mmhmm,” he looks up at Pinkman. “Sorry for making you shit yourself. I think I shit myself also,” he adds contritely, “if it’s any consolation.”

“It’s not.”

Cas wraps the glass in a wad of paper towels and dumps it in the trash. He thinks he got all of it, but gentleman that he is, he manoeuvres a chair over the impact site just in case, a stepping stone for Pinkman to get to clear of any fragments he missed. He offers his hand to help him down off the counter.

Pinkman ignores it as he steps wobbling onto the chair, hops clear and hovers by the breakroom doorway. Cas watches him try to cultivate a _don’t fuck with me_ stare, an air of danger and violence, but he only succeeds in looking frayed, like a wire with all the insulation stripped off.

“Where’s Ed?”

“Asleep, when I left him. But listen, since you’re up,” Cas pulls the file from his coat pocket, “you may as well take a look at these.” He tosses it with a _thwack,_ onto the table. “Coffee?” he asks, chipper, buoyant. The lightness is only partly feigned. He sets about making some before he gets an answer.

“What-”

“Your life, Mr. Driscoll. I’ve got your paperwork. Take a gander. Make sure you’re happy with it. I always welcome constructive feedback.” Blue eyes watch him. “Milk? Sugar?”

Pinkman contorts his jaw like he’s about to say something but the silence stretches. He slowly sinks into a chair. “Okay. Yeah.”

Casimir sets the coffee down well away from the papers. He’s more of a herbal tea guy; ginger and lemon in the morning, camomile at night. He fixes himself a mug, then leans against the sink, breathing the spices in, letting the steam fog his glasses.

Pinkman looks over the papers, mouth hanging open and pale eyebrows knotted. Everything he could possibly need and more is there; birth certificate, social security, even his parents’ birth, marriage and death certificates, tax documents, old W-2s. Everything stamped, signed, certified to prove Ellis Driscoll exists.

“Everything meet the standard you were expecting?”

Pinkman throws his hands up. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know what half this shit is for,” Cas knows his last legal job was nearly seven years before, “but yeah. Nice job. Real thorough.” There’s sincerity hidden in that sarcastic edge. Casimir raises his mug, makes the sign of the cross with it.

“Another satisfied customer.”

Pinkman shuffles the papers away, sighs as he passes a hand over his eyes. He looks exhausted, older. Casimir slides the coffee closer towards him as the kid watches through his fingers.

“It’s not poisoned,” he says.

Pinkman scoffs. “It’s a little milkier than I take it.” He sips, winces. “Hey, um…do you have any more of that bourbon?”

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s not great.”

“You won’t get car sick, will you?” Cas asks, taking the bottle down from a shelf. He passes it across the table.

Pinkman pours out a sizable glug for himself in response.

Casimir figures he ought to be responsible and fishes about in the fridge for a moment, slaps down a half full, (or empty, depending on your outlook) box of doughnuts. Mostly custard ones. Nobody at the mattress store likes the custard ones.

“Eat.” Cas breaks one open, scrapes the goop out it before taking a bite. Pinkman looks bemused and then follows suit. He chews with his mouth open.

“Ts’stale,” he says then swallows.

“Cold Chinese, bad coffee and stale doughnuts- that’s what keeps the customers rollin’ in,” Cas says with a lopsided grin. He drains the rest of his tea and nudges his mug over to Pinkman. “Hit me, will you?” Pinkman sloshes in the remains of the bourbon and passes the mug back; he seems to be evaluating Cas, without looking at him directly, focusing instead on wiping the custard off his fingers.

“So, is this what you do? You’re the paperwork guy?” Pinkman asks, finally looking up at him. Casimir straddles the chair opposite, chest against the backrest.

“Something like that,” he admits, taking a sip of bourbon. “I have a knack with computers. Comes in useful from time to time.”

“Some knack.”

“Nobody better,” Cas says, arms spread wide, “nor humbler.” That elicits not a smile exactly, but the corner of the kid’s mouth spasms. He tries to cover it with his mug. Cas grins wide enough for the both of them. “I think I’ve thrown you for a loop.”

“Actually, yeah,” the poker-face drops, “I was expecting someone more…”

“Dour? Serious? Reserved?”

“Ed-like.”

“A clone?”

“Ed 2.0.”

Cas laughs, “No, indeed. Not Ed-like. I try to keep him young; only succeed in turning him greyer.”

“So, what, you’re like his… protégé?”

Cas chokes on his drink.

“‘ _Protégé_ ’?” he coughs, “ _Zuchwały_ _;_ you make it sound like a euphemism.” Pinkman becomes his name.

“Yo, I didn’t- like, it’s cool, and whatever,” he stutters as Cas looks on, amused. He waves a hand.

“It’s alright,” he says, “and no, I’m not his,” he puts the word in air-quotes, “ _protégé_. A partnership sure, and I can see how I might be an odd choice of partner for a man of Ed’s…” he searches for the right phrase.

“Caution?” Pinkman supplies. Cas points his fingers like a gun, clicks his tongue.

“Driscoll’s quick. Yes, I don’t seem a _cautious_ man, do I? In comparison.” Cas reaches for another doughnut, makes a face as he eats it. Pinkman looks thoughtful, as if he’s deliberating whether or not to speak.

“Go ahead,” Cas says with a nod, curious what could be going through the kid’s mind.

“The guy that gave me Ed’s details,” he says, voice low, hesitant, “for the pick-up, when I was…anyway, he told me that he- that Ed- didn’t deal with junkies.” He sounds almost apologetic. “Your keys, last night. I saw your chip.”

Casimir isn’t embarrassed; he’s impressed. _Eagle-eyed_ , he thinks. 

He roots around his coat pocket until he finds them and rubs his thumb over the embossed metal of Marcus’s Eight Year NA chip. He remembers how proud Marcus was, to survive as long as he did to receive it. Each day lived clean a triumph.

Casimir remembers his own pride, mixed with deepest grief. Marcus was very sick by then. He lived another week beyond his eight-year anniversary and Cas had kept the chip on him since then, even though the significance of it didn’t stop him from his own brief and disastrous flirtation with heroin.

Ed had found him, in some drug den in the Tenderloin a month after the funeral. He’d been searching for days and when he finally found Casimir, had brought him back to Albuquerque where he saw in the new millennium puking into a bucket in Ed’s store basement, as if he was purging all the horrors of the last century out of himself. He had called Ed monstrous things in the many languages he knew and Ed had rubbed his back. When midnight rolled around, Casimir got methadone instead of champagne.

Cas feels those blue eyes watching him, a tenseness in them as they wait for him to say something. To explain why Ed won’t disappear a junkie, but will trust a junkie to help him do the disappearing.

“There were drugs, yes, but the chip is a reminder for something else. The drugs came a long time after I met Ed.”

“And now?”

Cas sees how it must look to Pinkman. Roaming the streets of Casper so late, like he’s on the hunt for something.

“No, not now. Not for a very long time. But occasionally, I find it hard to sleep.” Pinkman drops his gaze to the table. “I think you find it hard to sleep too, sometimes,” he adds.

The kid scoffs. His eyes are red-rimmed and frosty. “Yeah. Sometimes.”

They each take a sip of their bourbon. Cas drops the keys on the table and Pinkman starts at the noise. He weighs the moment, appraising Pinkman over the top of his glasses. “Alright?”

“Fine.”

“And in the office? You okay in there?”

Pinkman bristles. “What, like you want a review? No cable, room service sucked, two stars.”

“Have you slept at all since Ed and I left?”

“What do you care?”

_Angry hedgehog_ , Cas thinks, _rolling up when someone tries to get close_. He has something of Ed’s ability to wait out a silence, which he does now, watching the muscles in Pinkman’s throat contract as he swallows and finally sighs, “Ed told you about my _freak-out._ ” He spits it out like he’s disgusted with himself.

“He did, but I have eyes,” Casimir says gently, “and I’ve been in the back of the truck too, so to speak.”

Pinkman’s eyes narrow. That’s surprised him.

“You were a client?”

Cas takes another drink by way of an answer and the gesture seems to help resolve some private conversation Pinkman has been having with himself.

“Look, it wasn’t… I didn’t leave the office because of something like what happened in the truck, okay? I’m not, like, constantly losing my shit. So, you can report back to Ed, or whatever it is you have planned.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, mutters a _fuck_.

“I just… didn’t want to drink straight from the faucet,” he admits quietly, gaze firmly on the mug clasped in his hands. The sink in the office bathroom.

“I didn’t leave you a glass,” Cas sighs, realising. He can hear the history behind the statement, the _didn’t want to_ in place of _couldn’t bring myself to_. A small thing that brushed too close to what he had so recently escaped from.

Cas had made promises to himself when he was trapped, long lists of things he would never again do, or allow others to do to him. Even when the possibility of freedom had seemed so impossible, they sustained him, helped him see a future beyond his circumstances. Pinkman had done the same.

Cas is furious with himself and it must show, because there’s an inquiring fierceness to the look Pinkman’s now giving him that could do with softening. Time has helped create distance between himself and his experiences, but it’s been years since he spoke about them in the way he’s steeling himself to. He knew the moment was coming, but now that he’s in it, he feels off-kilter.

He takes his glasses off.

“I think you should know,” he says finally, “that I also got out of a place I thought I would die in.”

Pinkman shifts in his seat, hugging himself, begins to say something like, _I don’t know what you mean_ , before realising the futility of denial and because it’s still easier to show than say, Casimir peels off his coat, lets it fall to the floor.

The sleeves of his flannel shirt are rolled to his elbows, exposing the burns, the scars, the mottled, damaged skin. Pinkman - _bless him_ , thinks Cas- inhales sharply. Even without his glasses he feels those blue eyes taking him in, moving from his arms to his face, separating the laugh-lines and crow’s feet from the scars; trying to piece together Casimir’s story from the old wounds.

Pinkman doesn’t ask _who?_ or _why?_ because he knows there’s no explanation to be had, no justification or comfort to be found in the answers given. Instead, he settles for,

“When?”

“Seventeen years ago.”

From the silence, Casimir senses he’s imagining it for himself, a time from now he has that many years between his past and his present.

And then Cas tells him about Sarajevo, about the mistakes he made, the actions he regrets; about the circumstances in which he met Ed, something of the Before and the After. He tells Pinkman about the rooms of memory he made deep inside himself, places he would hide where the horror of his reality could not reach.

And in the telling he visits them again: _the way the morning light slanted into his childhood bedroom; the satisfaction of peeling an orange in one long coil; the summer he was nineteen, and a freewheeling leap into the sea from high cliffs; the feeling of cool water sliding over him._

He talks steadily, looking at Pinkman though his eyesight isn’t good enough to pick out the detail of his expression; the lack of sharpness helps.

“And now, I’m out. My body is here and it will never go back. I know this. But sometimes,” his heart is beating in his throat, “I get the feeling not all of my mind made it out.”

Cas hears Pinkman draw a couple of deeper breaths.

“And I think you also know this feeling.”

He puts his glasses back on, rests his chin on his arms across the back of the chair. The kid is still, only his chest rising and falling. One hand covers his mouth, as though he’s afraid of what might come tumbling out should he remove it. 

Pinkman can’t, in the wake of Casimir’s vulnerability, throw out any more of the barbed defences he’s been resorting to. He can’t meet honesty with deflection, or anger, or bitter remonstrations that Cas has no idea, because he does know. And there’s danger too, in the thread of understanding that runs between them, and in the compassion Pinkman can’t seem to help but radiate outwards, because there’s a chance it might turn inward onto himself and he can’t allow that.

Everything in Pinkman’s eyes is saying, _But I deserved it._

And everything in Casimir’s says, _No_.


	12. Casimir Effect (ii)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Second 'half' of a behemoth chapter. Strap in, kids. Shit is about to get relentlessly tender.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary:  
> Kurwa- kind of a catch-all expletive gets used like bitch/fuck.  
> jeżyk- diminutive for 'hedgehog' and slang to refer to a close cropped head of hair (crew cut style). I mean... it was kind of too perfect clever clever word play not to include.  
> If my Polish is way off base, btw, let me know.

1990, the summer he is nineteen, and Casimir is in a nightclub in Split dancing on his own to a song by Erasure. He meets a man called Stipan, who asks if he can buy him a drink. His eyes seem kind. Casimir says _yes_ and, in a few months, when he begins his compulsory military service, Stipan will help him get established on base as a man who can get things. Contraband. Everything and anything from dirty playing cards to liquor and drugs. Casimir likes the thrill of getting away with so much for so long, of feeling light and clever and capable of outfoxing all the world, so when his twelve months are up and Stipan proposes he sign up for three more years, Casimir does. He thinks what they have is love. Then, instead of black-market vodka, it’s arms, ammunition, stealing for men who radiate violence and the thrill morphs into fear and guilt and uncertainty. Stipan’s eyes don’t seem as kind as they used to be.

And it’s Casimir, not Stipan, who is made an example of when the latter attempts to go back on a deal made with dangerous men for the sake of a higher profit. In the months that follow, when he is trying to pinpoint the precise moment that’s his last chance to undo it all, he can’t conceive that it’s the night under the blue and purple lights, and the thumping music and Stipan’s offer of a drink. He should have said no, but he always, always says _yes_.

2008 and Jesse falls from a window into the path of his old chemistry teacher who offers him a choice: make meth together, or face the DEA. Jesse figures it isn’t really a choice, it’s out of his hands, and that’s what he tells himself as the months pass. For a long time, he thought he was just kind of swept away by the whole thing, but when he’s honest with himself, he admits there were times he’d been proud, times he felt he had accomplished something of magnitude. At times he lived for the faint praise Mr. White threw his way, lived for wanting to prove him wrong- that he could be clever and light and capable of outfoxing the whole world. At times it was thrilling to get away with so much for so long, even when the thrill became so tangled up in the fear and the guilt, he couldn’t separate them. At times, even now, at the end of everything, he thinks what he and Mr. White had was a kind of loyalty, distilled to it's purest form.

~

 _Have you told anyone?_ Ed’s man in Casper, the Forger, the Computer Guy – Casimir- asks from across the table.

A confession is what landed Jesse in the pit.

 _That was for the courts; I’m talking about…_ but there’s no word to cover the expanse of what Casimir is talking about, just a gesture that looks as though he’s ripping his heart out, holding it in his clenched hand. A confession he’d not been cornered into, that didn’t come with talk of sentencing or plea deals. A confession given without an objective to put Heisenberg behind bars. Casimir is talking about the sinew of Jesse’s regret.

He’s done therapy, group meetings, but this isn’t the same. There’s no turn taking, Casimir doesn’t offer advice; he doesn’t say much of anything. He listens and as Jesse talks, he finds himself moving further away from the cliff edge he’s been poised on for the last six months. He can’t articulate all his fears, but in the trying he finds them diminished.

_What do you want?_

Jesse wants…

_You’re allowed to want. You’re allowed to feel relief._

He feels as if all his bones have been plucked out of him and cleaned. He feels skinless and brittle. The voices that have been a constant presence in his head since the night he escaped the compound have grown quiet.

~

A glass of water has appeared hovering before him in the hand of Casimir. Jesse looks up into serious grey eyes flecked with brown. Jesse isn’t sure how long he’s been standing beside him. Cas doesn’t place the glass on the table but waits until Jesse takes it directly from his hand and gulps the water in one go. It slides, cool, down his throat.

“Almost sunrise,” there’s weight behind the way Cas says it that forces a sarcastic _ha_ from Jesse.

“What, is that some kind of metaphor?” he croaks, “Positive thinking bullshit?”

Casimir looks at his watch. “No, just fact.” They’ve been talking for hours. “When were you last outside?”

Jesse can’t remember. The night of the shootout with the welder and his friend? A week ago? Two? He remembers a beetle crawling over his fingertips, shell like oil. Iridescent, that’s the word. He realises he’s got his fingers extended, reliving the moment with an invisible bug. He curls his hand back into a fist, embarrassed and aware of Casimir watching him. Jesse shrugs to answer his question.

“It’s been a while, I think. Since you were outside.” Something in Casimir’s way of speaking has changed; there’s a softness to the consonants, the rounder vowels. He’s dropped the American accent, Jesse realises. This is his true voice.

He says, “Let’s go,” turns his body to the door.

“Where?”

“Out. Get out of this room.”

Jesse scoffs. “Sure. Right. Watch the sunrise. Put things in perspective, like, my problems are so small in the face of the cosmos, right? And wow, look at that. I’m a hundred percent fixed, or some shit.”

Casimir raises an eyebrow. “A hundred percent fixed? That’s a tall order.” He deliberates for a moment, staring Jesse down, “I think three percent.”

He scoops his coat from the floor and loops it over his arm. He drains the bourbon that’s left in his mug and nods, satisfied. “Three percent sounds right.” He strides past Jesse without looking at him.

“What, now?” Jesse calls after his retreating back. “I… need shoes.”

“Then get shoes; I’ll wait.”

And he does. Jesse finds him in the doorway leading to the delivery bay wreathed in what he first thinks is smoke. Cas is raising a hand to his mouth, fingers bent around the suggestion of a cigarette but they are empty. 

“Are you pretending to smoke?”

Casimir turns, looks at Jesse like he’s the oddball, expression saying _and what, you don’t?_

“I gave it up,” as if that explains it. Then, “It was intense in there.” What he’s really asking: _are you okay?_

“Yeah,” Jesse says and finds that he means it. His eyes are still hot and sore from crying, but the pre-dawn air feels good on his face. Casimir nods after a moment, exhales his pretend smoke and flicks his phantom cigarette into the shadows.

“You shouldn’t litter,” Jesse says and Casimir smiles, a deep sincere grin that takes Jesse by surprise.

“That’s the spirit,” he says, nudging Jesse with his shoulder before striding across the delivery bay.

Jesse follows, carefully watching the way Casimir moves; it’s a habit he picked up while in the compound, and while his survival might not hinge on his observations now, he finds he can’t switch it off. He had learned to steer clear of Kenny when he peeled the labels off his beer bottles; he had learned to be on high alert on Wednesdays when Todd’s distraction with the previous day’s interactions with Lydia left Jesse vulnerable to little acts of cruelty from the others. He had learned to be prepared for a bad day when Jack walked into the meth lab whistling.

From watching Casimir, Jesse has learned that he leans most of his weight on his left leg when he stands; that although his gait is confident, he has a little bit of a limp; he absentmindedly rubs his right shoulder every so often, like there’s a perpetual ache in it. Jesse knows that these observations would be useful in a fight- a swift kick to a bad ankle, elbow in the collarbone and he’d have the upper hand.

At some level he knows he’s being ridiculous, imagining a sudden brawl with Ed’s guy, but the idea is in his head all the same, which is why he flinches when Casimir stops on the metal staircase leading to the roof of the mattress store and thrusts his arm towards him.

“What?”

“I said ‘take it’,” his coat, “You’re shivering.”

Is he? He is. He didn’t bring a jacket of his own when he got his shoes. Jesse isn’t the only one capable of observing. He dislikes feeling read.

“What am I? Your prom date?”

“Well, I don’t see one of those flower thingys, so…” Cas shrugs, coat still in his hand.

“A corsage?”

“Ah, oui; une _boutonnière,”_ Cas plays with the word in an exaggerated accent, drawing out the syllables, growling the ‘r’.

Jesse doesn’t have a comeback for that; he’s completely disarmed. He takes the coat. It’s heavy. Substantial. A kind of dirty mustard colour, waxed fabric, brown corduroy collar. A rural country coat. It’s the kind of thing he’d envisioned wearing in Alaska. It’s warm.

Casimir continues up the stairs, taking them two at a time. It’s not far to the roof, but Jesse hasn’t walked so much in weeks. He’s huffing and puffing, hand pressed to his still healing side.

There’s some kind of aluminium structure rising out of the centre of the roof, a tangle of snaking vents which pop and ding when Casimir climbs onto it. He’s got a good five or six inches of height on Jesse, so he offers his arm to help him clamber up beside him. Jesse doesn’t ignore it this time. 

It’s a little after six and Casper is spread out before them in various shades of blue. The store is on the outskirts of town and Jesse can see the mountains looming up like a wave in the distance. The sky is growing paler with each passing second. It’s enormous. There are trees. It’s been a long time since Jesse saw trees.

The sun is rising behind them and as the land begins to yield to the light, Jesse has to sit down. He pulls his knees up and hugs them. He breathes in unfamiliar scents on the clear mountain air. To his dismay he feels tears well up behind his eyes; they come so easily to him, when he’s angry, frustrated, overwhelmed. He’s never been able to stop them coming.

Then from above him, Casimir’s voice, deep and serious.

“Look, Simba. Everything the light touches is our kingdom.”

 _This guy_ , thinks Jesse. 

“Are you for real?” he says into his knees.

“I find a sense of humour helps.”

“With what?”

“Most things.”

“Alright, Mufasa. Any other advice?”

“Ah, no. I start giving out advice, I’ll only expose myself as a hypocrite.” Casimir sits beside him with his ankles crossed, elbows resting on his knees. “But I suppose if you have questions…”

They sit quietly, watching the changing light. It’s not a spectacular sunrise at all, there are no long fingers of vibrant orange or pink streaking the sky. Just slowly moving clouds and the beginnings of a clear, bright day.

~

Casimir is rolling his sleeves down, buttoning the cuffs, when Pinkman breaks the silence.

“Does anyone else know? About what happened to you?” and in the seconds before he answers Casimir relives those four exquisite years with Marcus in San Francisco. The shit-hole apartment with the faded wallpaper, with the windows that never closed all the way, but worth it for the quality of the light, golden and warm and shattering.

He wants to lay out like photographs all the memories within him, have Jesse Pinkman see them, pour over them, but instead he swallows to steady his voice and says “Yes, someone knew. For a time.”

“’A time?’”

“He died.”

A look of horror passes over the kid’s face and Casimir mistakes it for sympathy at first. “No, no, not like that,” he reassures him. “Nobody was offed. He was sick. For a long time. Then he died.”

“I thought, maybe….”

“What? Ed popped him? For knowing too much?” That idea draws something like laughter from deep within him. “Is that how you see him? Truly?”

Pinkman shrugs. “I can’t see him being happy about it.”

Cas smiles remembering that first Thanksgiving he and Marcus hosted; Ed in their flat like some benevolent, gnarled oak tree, Marcus flitting about him, his wild shirt print making him look like a magnificent bird-of-paradise, and Casimir, sitting with his stomach in knots trying to figure out if Ed was truly enjoying himself or simply enduring the days out of some sense of duty. And at the end of the weekend, when they were seeing him off, Ed had placed his hand on the back of Casimir’s head and said, _I’m glad he found you_.

“No, Ed knew Marcus knew everything about me.”

“But he must have minded. Like, I haven’t known the guy as long as you have. Obviously. But, still, he’s all about the rules. Telling someone seems like it’s totally breaking rule number one.”

“He didn’t mind.” Casimir, amused, watches Pinkman try to untangle the nature of their relationship, correlate Cas’s Ed with his own.

“It wasn’t a decision lightly made,” he explains. “I fell in love.”

~

They lived in the same building; Cas had a room at the front, overlooking the street and Marcus was a floor above, way at the back with a view of a wall and no direct sunlight. Casimir had a routine; he’d leave his apartment before dawn and walk up the steeply inclined road, reaching the top of the hill at the same time as the light. He’d been in America for nearly a year, most of that time spent recovering in Montana under Ed’s watchful eye. Walking up the sheer streets of San Francisco was good exercise. He was getting stronger.

Marcus was from Haiti and he regarded sunlight and warmth as more necessary than oxygen, which is why he’d be out on the front steps of their apartment building with his coffee, soaking up the light like a cat when Cas returned from his morning walk. The first week they had only nodded at each other. The second week Marcus tried out a _bonjour_ when Casimir finally met his eye. Later that day, Casimir went out and dropped over a hundred dollars on language tapes and French dictionaries using the credit card Ed paid for. He phoned Cas when he saw the charges.

_I’m glad you’re finally using it, but ‘far as I know you can’t eat books. Put some damn groceries on it from time to time._

“I must learn French.”

 _You ‘must’? What, for a job?_ He didn’t have a job yet. Ed had told him to take his time. He was good for money.

“No, I…” and he hadn’t known how to continue. Experience had taught him to be careful about revealing his sexuality, and although Ed and never done or said anything to indicate a prejudice, Casimir wasn’t sure how he would react. When he talked about his past, he tried to keep things vague. _Stipan and I were partners and he betrayed me._ Not an outright lie, and he hoped the deeper implications went unnoticed.

But then Ed wasn’t an idiot.

 _You…trying to get in someone’s good graces?_ and then very gently he’d asked, _A boy?_

“Yes.”

And Ed, who’d grown up in Louisiana, had said, _Alright, I can help you practise, d’accord?_

~

Ed tells him to keep a low profile. Casimir tells him he doesn’t exist in a vacuum- he’ll need people in his life. Jesse thinks these principles are mutually exclusive; the best way is the way that doesn’t leave damage in his wake.

Jesse had been in love, for a time, and then, each time, they died. He might not have been the one to do it, but they had died because they knew him. He was accountable. He wasn’t planning on falling in love again. He figures he can sustain himself on memories alone. They come to him so clearly, they often feel like reality.

Like now, in Casper, he can hear birds. Sparrows probably, that distinctive chirping coming from the trees nearby and that takes him back to Albuquerque. In the small back garden of the duplex there had been sparrows. They kicked up a racket way too early every morning and Jesse would bury his head under the pillows and groan. Sometimes they were so fucking noisy he wondered if they’d gotten into his bedroom somehow. When he got to know Jane better, he learned she’d been feeding them, breaking up bits of the toast she’d have before work and idly tossing them the crumbs.

Later still, when she started staying over at his, Jesse would wake up when they began chirping, and he’d roll over groaning, expecting to meet Jane in the middle of the bed, doing the same. But she’d be asleep, oblivious to the noise. It became a moment he’d look forward to, these little sneaked glances of her softer side; it tempered his annoyance at being woken. He would drowsily nestle up against her shoulder, breathing in her bare skin or the clean laundry scent of her flannel pyjamas and absorb some of her tranquillity for himself.

~

Casimir knows he’s going to pay for this; his back is already complaining, the muscles growing tense from trying to keep the shape he’s twisted himself into, but Jesse’s head has gone heavy on his shoulder and his breath is deep and even. He’s asleep, and he needs it, so Casimir doesn’t move.

He would be more comfortable if he rested his own head against Jesse’s, but that, Casimir thinks, presumes a level of familiarity he has no right to, despite everything that’s transpired so far. If he shifts too much, he risks waking Jesse and the moment will be over.

He hasn’t exactly been celibate since coming to Casper; there have been encounters, infrequent, satisfying sometimes, but the intimacy of this particular moment undoes something in Cas. He remembers how it feels to be tender. There’s a sensation in his lungs like that of a balloon being inflated. He feels as though his ribs are going to come bursting out of his body.

In fifty minutes, it will be eight o’clock and Jesse will back in the truck, heading north. Casimir needs to feel every second of those minutes. 

_Forty minutes._

When he breathes his shoulder rises and he can feel the stubble of Jesse’s hair rasping against the skin of his neck. _Jeżyk,_ he thinks, far too pleased with all the levels on which that play of words works.

 _Half an hour_.

Cas realises he’s started thinking of him as ‘Jesse’ instead of ‘Pinkman’, though he should be thinking of him as ‘Ellis Driscoll’. He really shouldn’t be thinking of him at all.

 _Twenty minutes_.

Cas’s legs have gone numb.

At quarter to eight Casimir’s phone vibrates in his pocket and Jesse startles awake, looking even more jeżyk-like as he does so.

“Say what?” He squints into the sunlight, rubs his hands over his face. “Did I fall asleep?”

“Yes.”

Jesse massages the cheek that has been pressing into Casimir’s shoulder for the last hour, wipes a line of spittle from the corner of his mouth.

“Wha- shit.” He blushes. He plucks at the wet patch on Casimir’s shirt.

“Ah, yes. You drooled on me.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You needed to rest,” Cas slides off the vent, wincing as the feeling returns to his legs. He stretches his arms over his head and Jesse grimaces as his spine pops and snaps like a firecracker.

“Dude,” he says.

Cas sighs as the tightness in his muscles loosens just a little. He tries moving his head to the right, hisses when it resists.

“Hey,” Jesse is looking at him with an expression Cas can’t read. “You okay?”

“Just stiff,” he says a little too tightly to be convincing.

“You look…”

Cas tries giving him a reassuring smile, but he feels it go wrong. “Ed’s here.” He doesn’t need to read the message on his phone to know.

~

Ed is leaning against the side of his truck reading yesterday’s _Casper Star-Tribune_ in the early morning sun. He folds it up when he hears footsteps coming down the metal staircase and waits. Pinkman appears, swamped in Casimir’s jacket and he looks drained of all the poison that had been in him. Tired, but there’s a stillness about him that hadn’t been there previously. His eyes keep flicking sidelong at Cas whose own eyes are fixed on the truck.

Casimir’s idea of corralling his emotions is to move his heart from one sleeve to the other and hope Ed doesn’t notice. He doesn’t have as good a poker face as he thinks he does, and under the tight half-smile he’s trying to keep up, Ed can sense that he’s hurting. The way his body moves is off, the usual bounce is gone. He’s hunched and tense and Ed can see it’s more than physical pain- he’s bereft.

And watching them walk in step together across the delivery bay, Ed berates himself for his uncharacteristic naivety the night before. He should have seen this coming.

~

Jesse goes to collect his bags out of the office.

Ed asks, “How we doing?”

“He’ll be okay,” Cas replies, softly, waiting until Jesse vanishes behind the door.

“Meant you,” Ed says. He’s levelling Cas with one of his _don’t bullshit_ _me_ looks, hands on his hips.

“I’m alright,” he says but his voice falters. “It was a long night,” he adds, like papering over a crack in a wall.

Ed considers him a moment longer before drawing a deep breath in through his nose and letting it out with a sigh.

“Shoulder?”

“Mmm.”

And Casimir turns, leaning into Ed’s hands which are already on the shoulder in question, probing the muscle in the crook of his neck, applying pressure in just the right places. He seeks out the knots as he’s done hundreds of times before and with each circular movement the pain lessens into relief.

~

Jesse stands motionless in the doorway, bags in hand. Ed catches his gaze and the look he throws him says, _wait._ He returns his attention to Casimir’s shoulder, knuckles digging deeply into the muscle and Jesse feels he ought to look elsewhere, that he’s an intruder in this moment between them, but instead he watches as the tension leaves Cas, his face looser, his eyes closed. He finds himself thinking of his parents and he tries to remember the last time, or really any time, he hugged them. He knows he did, but he can’t picture any specifics, or recall how it felt to have their arms around him.

What he does remember is Mr. White’s hands on his shoulders, comforting him after he found the ricin in the Roomba- he needs to correct that memory. Not comforting, covering his ass. His paternalistic approach was manipulative, a means to an end, never genuine.

 _Never?_ It had certainly felt genuine, sometimes.

It’s clear _this_ is genuine, what Cas and Ed have between them, and the moment is throwing into relief just how starved Jesse is for touch. Yesterday, Ed had pressed Jesse’s hand to his heart and held it there as he tried to regain control of himself; just a few hours ago Casimir gave him a coat to keep him warm and let him sleep against his shoulder and he realises, rather belatedly, that the intimacy of every one of those gestures has undone something in him. Jesse remembers what it’s like to be on the receiving end of gentleness. He feels as though he’s made of glass.

And then it’s time. Ed punctuates his massage by ruffling Casimir’s hair and jerking his head at Jesse. “All set?”

Jesse nods and Ed looks from him to Cas and back again, and with a final pat on Casimir’s back, he turns and makes his way to the cab of the truck. Cas sways a little like he’s asleep on his feet, but his eyes open as Jesse draws nearer. He says, “I guess that’s you,” and after a beat, takes the bags from him. Jesse starts to take off the coat he borrowed, but Cas stops him with a shake of his head.

“Keep it. I’ve got others.” He moves towards the back of the truck before Jesse can say anything.

Jesse watches him arrange the bags in the compartment, watches him brush a hand over the foam mat, ridding it of dirt or lint or whatever, as if it’s important that it’s clean, watches him comb that same hand through his hair before turning, and, rather than stepping out of the way to let him pass by out of that narrow space, Jesse, who feels a need to say something that he doesn’t have the vocabulary for, steps forward and tentatively rests his forehead against Casimir’s chest.

There’s a pause as Cas’s breath stutters, then Jesse feels his chest rise and fall, air passing warm across the exposed skin of his scalp. Cas wraps his arms around Jesse’s shoulders, gently pressing him closer and allowing him to lean some of his weight into the embrace. Jesse feels lighter than he has in months.

They stand that way for barely more than a minute and it’s Cas who ends it, pulling him tighter for an instant before releasing him and moving past. He stands with his back to Jesse until he’s climbed into the compartment and when he turns, his face which has been so expressive is now unreadable.

“Ready?”

“Yeah,” Jesse’s voice cracks and Cas gives him the last of his lopsided half-smiles before he swings the panel up between them.

~

Ed is watching him intensely as he climbs into the passenger seat, but Cas doesn’t feel he has enough control of himself yet to return the look. He stares out of the windshield as Ed starts the truck and drives slowly down to the padlocked back entrance gate. Cas gets out to unlock it, holds it open as Ed draws up alongside him and rolls his window down.

“Ah hell, I shouldn’t have-”

“You’re fine, old man,” Casimir interrupts, “I’ll be alright.”

“Cas…”

“How I feel isn’t on you.”

Ed regards him silently before reaching out and ruffling his hair for the second time that morning; it’s one of his few emotional tells, something he does when he’s worried about him.

“Fridge was looking a little bare,” he says finally, “Just about scraped enough together to leave you an omelette.”

“I’ll get groceries later. Scout’s honour.”

“Try to include some solid food along with your liquid diet.”

“Sure thing. Vegetables. Meat.”

“It’s a start.”

“Thanks for the omelette, anyway. I’ll bet you did my dishes too.”

“Ruined whatever science experiment you had growing on them, yes.” He sighs. “Alright, truck’s not gonna drive itself.” He looks at Cas, needing his permission to put the truck into gear, to leave, and Cas is so full of love for this man who is as a father to him, a brother, his friend.

He raises a hand in farewell, knowing that Ed is looking at him in the wing mirror as he finally drives through the gate and onto the road. Casimir watches until it’s out of sight, swings shut the gate and padlocks it.

Back in the store, he attends to all the things that need attending to; sliding the mattress back into the stock room, washing the mugs, wiping down the table and countertops, anything Jesse might have touched. The empty bourbon bottle, the old donuts go in the trash. The sheets and bedding he piles into his truck to take back home.

He takes stock of himself when he’s in the driver’s seat. He’s bone-tired, but he should be okay to drive if he goes slowly, carefully. His hand trembles when he goes to put the key in the ignition; he flexes it, shakes it out and tries again. This time it goes in smoothly. He grips the steering wheel at ten and two, lays his head down on it and takes a couple of deep breaths. He can still feel the weight of Jesse on his chest.

He needs music.

He rummages through all the detritus in the glove box, frowns when his fingers don’t find what he’s looking for and that’s when he remembers.

“ _Kurwa.”_

~

Ed’s phone pings with a message that reads _Tell him he can keep it_ at the same time Jesse, in the back of the truck, discovers Casimir’s iPod in one of his new coat’s inner pockets. It’s a ten-hour drive to Valier and, typically, the battery is dead. Jesse inspects it in the light of the camping lantern. It’s an older model, silver back scuffed and scratched all to hell, thin spider-web cracks in the clear casing. 30 GB of Casimir’s music- of Cas, in a way.

Jesse knows he’ll eventually have to give a name to what he is feeling, but the coat is warm and he is tired. He nuzzles into the collar, breathing in the comforting scents of the fabric; he’s reminded of cedar, of smoke and moments later he sleeps. He stays sleeping, all the way to Valier.


	13. Bond Vibes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ed's POV and a wee bit more (non canon) backstory since he's been cooling his heels in the wings for a while.  
> PS- some impossible geography here so don't @ me. I had no idea Montana is so f-ing flat.

Two people know about Ed Galbraith’s house; Casimir - who comes and goes when he needs time alone under the big Montana sky - and Nancy, the woman in Valier who checks up on it twice a week, waters his plants and who knew him back before he was Ed Galbraith.

He bought it in ’78, one of the years he was ‘between jungles’ as his colleagues put it and he’d had the foresight to make the purchase using another alias to create a safe house, off the grid, and untraceable. The house was more of a shack back then, but it had been the hundred acres of land Ed had wanted, empty and bare, with sweeping views down to Lake Frances and the mountains beyond. _Good grazing land_ , the realtor had called it, but Ed had no interest in raising cattle. It was stark and alien, bleak when compared to the lush bayous of his boyhood, the flaming autumns and green springs of his college years in Massachusetts. There were very few trees; after seventeen years of semi-tropics and rainforest, he’d had his fill of trees.

The house is no longer a shack- it’s a sleek modernist build, lines of it sympathetic to the landscape. It lies nestled between two rolling hills, a rare blip in the surrounding flatness, and practically invisible from the main road. From the approach, it looks like a bunker, the physical manifestation of the value Ed places on discretion, but the front faces onto a clean sweep of those vistas of the lake and mountains he had fallen in love with. He had installed sliding glass doors which gave unobstructed views of them from the open plan living room.

Casimir comes to the house to recuperate. Nancy comes for companionship. And now Pinkman, still in Casimir’s coat, stands in his living room, looking across at the mountains which are bathed orange in the dying light of the day. His jaw is slack, eyes still a little bleary from being woken from a deep sleep.

“Well,” he says, “this is…unexpected.”

Ed bites. “What were you expecting?”

The mid-century furniture is older than Pinkman is, kind of shabby and worn, though if Ed were a man who followed interior design trends, he would know he was ahead of the curve; decor so dated, it was vintage and starting to come back into fashion.

Pinkman turns to Ed with his hands on his hips.

“Like… a warehouse. A laundromat. Fuck, I dunno. An abandoned industrial site.” He sweeps his arms around the room. “Not this… this… Frank Lloyd Wright shit.”

Ed cocks his head at the mention of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Pinkman rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s right. I know things,” he scoffs, “outside of…” he waves a hand vaguely.

“The meth industry,” Ed says bluntly, and Pinkman slides on that saucer-eyed look of his. “Ain’t no wire taps up here. Say what you mean to say.”

The last of the day has left the mountain tops and darkness falls quickly this time of year. Pinkman’s reflection in the glass doors grows sharper.

“Okay, yeah. In high school, I took this shop class and we- one of the things we did was look at different kinds of architecture. It was cool, you know? I guess I liked his stuff the most.”

Ed has picked up on a tell Pinkman has when he talks about the things he likes. He tends to drop his gaze to his shoes, turns sideways or hunches over while he’s speaking like he’s trying to protect his admission from too much scrutiny. If he’s sitting, he’ll bring his arms up by his head, make a little cage for himself with his elbows. He’s looking at his shoes now.

“So, it’s an interest of yours. Architecture?”

“I guess,” he begins, frowning like he’d not considered it before. “Or no, maybe just how stuff gets built. Doesn’t have to be like, a house, or a building, but…” he trails off into memory. Ed has become familiar with that look too. 

He also senses the embers of a fire in need of stoking.

“Man should have a hobby. Might be something to ponder when you get north,” then, before the kid has the opportunity to dismiss the idea, adds, “Hungry?”

“ _Fuck yes._ Starving.” That’s perked him up.

There’s no door separating the living room and a kitchen, just an open archway flanked by a fireplace on one side and bookcase set into the wall on the other. The kitchen is small but well laid out. No wasted space.

Nancy had swung by before they arrived, dropping off essentials- milk, bread, eggs from her own chickens – and things Ed considers to be essential like gorgonzola and Emmental, radicchio, grapes. She’s also left him something to heat in the oven, knowing he’d be due in after a long weekend of driving without much oomph to cook for himself.

“Is that a lasagne?”

“Yep.”

“But how…”

Nancy may know about Ed’s ‘bespoke services’ but she’s a true civilian and he wants her to remain one.

“I have my ways,” Ed offers, fiddling with the settings on the oven.

“Right, right. Guys behind the curtain.”

“There’s garlic bread too,” the premade frozen crap, but then life is full of small disappointments.

While he’s waiting for the oven to come up to temperature, Ed walks back to the living room, up to what seems to be a bare patch of wall and fiddles with it for a moment. Pinkman follows him, watches in confusion then surprise as the panel slides away revealing a well-stocked booze cabinet.

“Place is empty most of the time,” Ed explains, “and teenagers get bored.” Not that he was particularly worried about kids in Valier breaking in, but he’d be damned if his lost his whisky collection to passing chancers. The oven dings.

“Food first,” he says to Pinkman who is peering over his shoulder to inspect the bottles. The kid follows him back to the kitchen like a puppy, hovers as he slides the lasagne in to cook. Ed ate on the road up, and he’s in the mood for something lighter, simpler. A grilled cheese sandwich would hit the spot. He reaches for the bread, goes to the fridge for the cheese and butter and every which way he turns Pinkman is underfoot.

“There’s time enough for you to shower, if you want,” he says to his second shadow. Pinkman frowns.

“Do I stink or something?” It’s been almost 48 hours since they left Albuquerque. Ed decides to let the question sit.

“Or I can show you your set up for tonight,” he starts off towards the bedrooms.

“ _Abath_ ,” Pinkman says, voice sharp.

“Come again?”

“I’d rather have a bath,” he says, then, a little less assertively, “If that’s alright?”

“Fine by me. Plenty of water. Hot too,” the shower in the vacuum store basement could be a little brisk at times.

Ed flicks the light switch in the bedroom Pinkman will be staying in. The bed is made for once (Nancy’s doing, doubtless) and there are clean towels on the armchair in the corner. The bedroom also contains the only TV in the house and there’s another bookshelf set into the wall. Instead of books it contains dozens upon dozens of DVDs.

Ed doesn’t really get Cas’s obsession with film- he’s not much of a movie guy himself, but Cas and Nan can swap lines back and forth ‘til the proverbial cows come home, and Ed gets a kick out of watching them try to outdo each other with their imitations of actors he’s never heard of.

“I reckon you’d be welcome to watch something, but he has…” a byzantine organizational system when it comes to arranging his films, “… he’s particular about where they go. So, proceed at your peril.”

There’s a window that is filled with sky and mountains in daylight, but is now a pitch-black rectangle. Ed draws the blind down.

“Is this…?

“Cas’s room? Yeah.”

“And he doesn’t- like, he’s okay I’m in here?”

“If he minded, you’d be spending the night in the truck,” Ed points down the hall, “I’m there, and opposite is the bathroom. You go ahead and get the days off you.”

~

Cas’s bedroom had been his originally, when he first built the house. For a while, it was the only bedroom. He had hopes, once, to build a second, but it was a hope he never got to realise.

It had been a long drive up to Montana from Baltimore. The ship’s doctor had done what he could for Casimir, but six weeks of recovery at sea was a scant drop against seven months of physical and psychological hell. All his old safe houses and haunts were no good by the time they made port, so Ed had shopped around until he found a beat-up VW Vanagon that allowed Cas to stay prone and let his ribs heal and sleep while Ed drove. He drove at night as much as he could, pulled off road during the day and slept on the floor of the van. Casimir had only spoken when spoken to, keeping his replies as short as possible.

Ed, not exactly talkative himself, found his silence eerie. Even on the ship, when the doctor was setting his broken ankle, slotting his dislocated shoulder back into place, he didn’t whimper, just stared at the ceiling with a kind of resigned passivity. Ed’s mother had once told him neglected children learn not to cry because they’ve realised no one will come to comfort them when they do. That little refrain often came to mind as they travelled.

Ed found himself with a need to fill the silences, telling Casimir about his childhood in Louisiana, about the time his father had taken him night fishing and, shining a light on the water, Ed had seen the red glowing eyes of semi-submerged alligators; he recited old legends about voodoo witches in the swamps, and hard drinking characters with names like ‘Two-Toes’ Thibodaux and Catfish Sam. He was aware he was spinning out tales like Cas was a child in need of a bedtime story, but he gave no indication if Ed’s efforts were appreciated, tolerated or ignored. Ed wasn’t even sure how much English Casimir spoke at that point, if he feigned understanding as part of some survival technique.

He’d eventually come to learn Casimir spoke more languages than he did. He absorbed everything Ed had told him during that trip and once they got to the house on the outskirts of Valier, some beginning of trust had clicked into place. They’d arrived early in the morning and Ed had helped him hobble into the living room. He’d gasped when he saw the view and immediately, unexpectedly, crumbled. Cas had cried into Ed’s shirt, unburdening himself of a lifetime’s worth of fear and pain, the relief Ed felt outweighed his alarm at the ferocity of it.

Ed had had to sleep on the bedroom floor at first, right up against the door, his body a barricade between it and Cas in the bed, but he’d slept in more uncomfortable places before. Gradually, as Casimir grew stronger in mind as well as body, Ed had been able to set up on the couch, waking up each morning to the views of the mountains. 

During their second month, Ed found himself thinking about the blueprints for the extension he’d done up ten years before- the dashed hope they represented rekindled.

~

Ed sends a text to Casimir when he hears water filling the bathtub.

_O.K._

Two letters, but three layers of meaning: 1) that they got to the house without incident 2) an acknowledgement of Cas’s _Tell him he can keep it_ , whatever the _it_ is and 3) an unsaid question regarding Cas’s well-being.

He calls half an hour later when Ed is taking Nan’s lasagne out of the oven.

“Yep.”

 _Did I mention the plates?_ his voice is low and groggy, newly peeled from sleep. The licence plates for the truck; Ed will exchange them for Canadian ones before they cross the border.

“You mentioned the plates.”

_Okay, because I couldn’t remember._

“Well, don’t worry; you did.”

 _Good, good._ There’s a long pause. Ed can hear him breathing. The lasagne bubbles on the countertop. The garlic bread is cooling on the side, filling the room with the scent of herbs and butter.

“Got some sleep then?”

_Mmhmm._

“Glad to hear it,” and then, because it’s clear Casimir isn’t going to come out with the question he wants to ask, he adds, “Cargo’s less fragile this time.”

_Yeah?_

“Yep. Out cold the whole way up.”

A sigh on the other end of the phone, _Good, good._

“So, was it the coat?”

_Coat?_

“That he’s keeping.”

_Ah. No. I mean yes, that, but… I left my…iPod. In it._

“I can bring it back down on the flip side.”

_No, no. No need. I already bought a replacement._

“You’re sure?”

_Yes, I’m sure._

“Well, if you’re sure.”

_Tell him there’s a charger for it. Um…bedside table drawer._

Ed’s turn to sigh.

From the phone, _You don’t approve._

Ed thinks he’s been careless. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s gone and shoved Cas in front on an incoming train. Offering to set him up as ‘Tech Support’ all those years ago had been an act of desperation. Ed had felt responsible for giving him a purpose after Marcus died, and it was a way of keeping an eye on him without being overbearing. He didn’t think twice when he accepted. Just felt relief; he was out of the woods. He is good at what he does, seems to relish it at times. Now, he’s wondering if Cas has only stayed in the role out of some sense of obligation to him.

“Kid,” he begins, switching to French when Pinkman walks into the room looking fresh and scrubbed, “si je n'approuve pas, cela vous changera-t-il d'avis?” _If I didn’t approve, would it change your mind?_

Hearing the French, Pinkman gives him a bewildered look, and there’s a soft, concessionary chuckle on the other end of the call.

_No. Maybe not so much._

Ed hands Pinkman a plate, indicates he should serve himself as he moves away.

“Quoi qu'il en soit, mon approbation n'est pas quelque chose que vous devez craindre de perdre.” _Anyhow, my approval is not something you have to worry about losing._ His own father had said something similar to him when he was younger. He tries to channel the same tone he used now.

He hears Casimir swallow, say, _I know._

“Alright. Go back to sleep.”

_Bonsoir._

“Bonne nuit,” Ed clicks his phone shut and turns to find Pinkman standing between the kitchen and the living room, awkwardly trying to hold his plate steady as he stabs at the lasagne with a fork. All Ed really wants to do at this point is eat his grilled cheese and go to bed, but he figures he ought to play host for a while, set the kid at ease before he has to scrape meat and sauce out of his carpet.

“There’s chairs, you know. For sitting.” He takes his sandwich to the round table by the sliding doors.

Pinkman throws him a withering look, “I’m just…I dunno, man. Getting Bond vibes.”

“‘ _Bond vibes?’”_

“Yeah, you know,” he nods to Ed’s hidden booze cabinet, then the chairs, “like if I sit in the wrong place, I’m gonna be dumped into a tank full of sharks, or alligators or piranhas or some shit.”

“Fanciful imagination you have.” He takes a bite of his now cold sandwich as Pinkman finally chooses a seat and puts his plate on the table.

“It’s classic Bond,” he frowns, “You know Bond.”

Ed can’t help himself. He might not be a movie guy but he doesn’t live under a rock.

“He got some kind of aquarium?”

“Dude, you can’t be serious.”

Ed chews thoughtfully, “You mentioned piranhas. Not sure what I’m supposed to make of that.”

“James fucking Bond? Double Oh Seven?” he does the finger gun pose. “Seriously?”

“Oh, sure. George Lazenby played him.” He is actually quite partial to _On Her Majesty’s Secret Service._

Pinkman groans, rolls his eyes so hard Ed’s prepared for them to fall out. “Yeah, okay. Enough. You’ve had your fun.”

“Don’t know why I’d booby trap my own house.”

“Like, in case people come for you,” Pinkman shrugs, “in the night, or something.”

Ed wipes crumbs from his mouth with studied care. “Do I seem the kind of man who is worried about people coming for him in the night?”

Pinkman freezes with the fork halfway to his mouth. “Uh, no. I guess not.”

Ed reigns it in. Chuckling to himself, he takes his plate to the kitchen, washes it up, then gets two lowball glasses. He holds one up to Pinkman who nods, “Yeah, if you’re offering?”

“I’m offering,” and he pours some Old Forester into each glass. His measures are significantly more moderate than Casimir’s.

“I’m to tell you, you can keep it,” he says as he takes a sip.

“Keep what?” Pinkman asks through the food in his mouth.

“iPod.”

“Was that Casimir” his name comes out like _Cat Zimmer_ , “on the phone?”

“It was,” Ed catches sight of his reflection in the doors. He recognizes the look- he’s seen it on all the imperious, suspicious fathers he’s ever had to sit across from at family dinners during his teenage dating years. He pulls the curtains across, says, “There a charger too, in a drawer. Bedside table.”

“I can give him money for it, I mean-”

“It’s a gift.”

“I don’t think he meant to…when he gave me-”

“It’s a gift.”

Pinkman is blushing, “That’s… that’s generous of him.”

“He’s a generous man.”

Pinkman is studying his plate, scraping a nubbin of garlic bread through the puddles of sauce. He looks like he’s fighting an urge to raise the whole thing to his face and lick it clean. Ed says, “Help yourself to seconds, if you want.” He does want.

Once he’s packed his second helping away, and polished off the last of the garlic bread he asks, “So what now?”

“Bed for me.” 

“I meant tomorrow.” Monday.

“R and R. I’m no spring chicken, Driscoll,” he figures he ought to start getting Pinkman used to his new surname, “and I’ve just put thirteen hundred miles behind us in two days. I’m taking tomorrow off.”

He gestures to the drapes, the land beyond them, “Beautiful country out there and nobody on it. You’ve got a long time coming in the box. My advice is to soak up as much sky and space as you can tomorrow and then on Tuesday, we head north.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who is reading this story- your comments have been so encouraging and humbling. I hope you all continue to enjoy this :)


	14. Ghosts in the Bedroom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little meditative somethin' somethin' along with a bit more Mysterious Ed (non-canon) backstory.  
> Edit: I left off Cas's POV when I uploaded it. My bad!

Jesse is brushing his teeth in Ed Galbraith’s bathroom, which, he thinks, is yet another bizarre fucking scenario in what’s turned out to be a bizarre fucking life. He stares at the mirror as he moves his brush up and down, side to side. Not at his reflection, he still can’t quite do that, but the mirror itself. It’s one of those run-of-the-mill medicine cabinet mirror combos. Pretty much every house he’s ever been in has had some version of this mirror and when Jesse was a teenager (and, let’s face it, an adult) at house parties, he would rifle through them, partly out of curiosity, partly because he has an opportunistic streak in him a mile wide.

 _Had_ , he corrects himself _, that’s not me anymore._

The opportunist in him might have been replaced with a better grasp of the consequences of his actions, but the curiosity remains. He spits into the sink and swings the mirror open.

An unopened box of toothpaste. Dental floss. Advil. Eucalyptus nasal spray. Some fancy looking aftershave balm which Jesse guesses is Casimir’s because he strikes him as a man who moisturises properly. A bottle of Old Spice which is definitely Ed’s because he doesn’t look as if he’s ever heard the word ‘moisturise’ before. There’s also a glass jar of cold cream, the logo a woman’s slender hands. There are three toothbrushes.

Jesse’s had first noticed this discrepancy when he was filling the bathtub and idly looking over the range of soaps, shampoos, conditioners on the side of the tub. People who buy those awful 3 in 1 body/hair washes don’t also shell out money for organic, paraben free shampoos. Certainly not twice over and neither Ed nor Cas (in the brief time Jesse was close enough to smell him) ever exuded the scent of strawberries. He doesn’t discount the possibility Casimir might be bisexual with a hook-up in Valier, or someone in Casper he brings north for a getaway, but coupled with the fresh lasagne waiting in the fridge, Ed’s extra-evasiveness regarding its origins, Jesse reckons,

 _“_ Ed’s got a girlfriend.” He whispers it to himself in a sing-song voice. The idea of it makes him oddly happy. He tries to picture what she might look like, can’t conjure anything except a carbon copy of Ed, but with a head of beautiful, glossy hair.

 _Creepy_ , he thinks, _Thanks, brain_.

He turns his attention back to the medicine cabinet. Irish Spring soap, still boxed. A safety razor. Band-aids. Antihistamine. Q-tips. A cluster of prescription bottles all made out to _Taylor, Joseph_ from a Casper pharmacy. An alphabet of pills; these for pain management, these for insomnia, these for anxiety and Jesse feels a familiar tightness forming in his chest that isn’t, for once, in response to his own situation.

It was only that morning they left Casper, but it already feels days ago. Jesse had slept the whole way up, waking once, blearily, when Ed had prised the compartment open and switched the lantern on. _Oh_ , he’d said, apologetic. He’d been banging through the panel in the cab of the truck, doing his usual check-in and gotten no response. _Not a good sign, usually_ , he’d added before switching the lantern off and closing Jesse back up in the box. Jesse had remained awake long enough to roll over and feel the truck rumble to life. It had been a deep sleep, dreamless, unbroken from then until Ed woke him a second time when they reached the house. It had been the best sleep he’d had in nearly a year. He’d felt restored. He knows he has Cas to thank for it.

Every word out of Cas’s mouth had been to his benefit somehow, to buoy him, to lend hope, resilience, and Jesse kept going back to that moment on the staircase; him, prepared for violence, and Cas, offering only warmth. And on the roof, the little corner of peace up against his shoulder in the sunlight, another hour of undisturbed sleep, had been given without strings. Jesse had only done the same for him once, asking if he was okay right before they parted ways and Cas’s lie that yes, he was, had been for Jesse’s benefit again. The truth of it was, he had not been okay, and neither had Jesse; when he’d laid his head against Casimir’s chest in the back of the truck, it was more than gratitude he’d been trying to convey. There had been grief in the gesture; Jesse had felt at his back- still feels- a spectre of loss, finger posed to tap him on the shoulder and remind him that those few hours spent in affinity were it, the sum total of their friendship.

Jesse comes back to himself when he hears Ed moving about in the hallway. He doesn’t know how long he’s occupied the bathroom. He swings the cabinet shut, wipes away the smudge of his fingerprint in the corner and rinses off his toothbrush. He opens the door, expecting to see Ed standing there impatiently, but the hall is empty.

~

Nancy is the kind of woman who leaves flowers in his bedroom ‘to brighten the place up’ and Ed’s the kind of man who won’t tell her the pollen makes him sneeze because then she’ll stop and he likes arriving after a long drive to these little bursts of life and colour. He likes imagining her frowning as she decides where to place the vase. He doesn’t mind that she never uses a coaster so that the wood is a patchwork of condensation rings. It’s like an archive of her visits. He’ll move the flowers to the living room before he goes to sleep.

Ed’s also the kind of man who has a hidden safe embedded in his floor. In it are all the things you would expect a man in Ed’s profession to have; money, in a range of currencies; passports, in a range of nationalities; other IDs, with a range of names; there’s a velvet bag plump with precious stones, both cut and uncut since not all clients can pay in cash, and although Ed considers himself unsentimental, he absolutely is. There are artifacts from his Before life; his degree from MIT which bears his real name. Letters from his mother. His father’s cherrywood pipe. The only photograph he has of the woman he’d once hoped to build a life with.

The safe is also noticeable for what it doesn’t contain, which is weaponry. No guns, no ammo. That comment Pinkman had made at dinner, about people coming for him, had indeed been a concern, once upon a time, but not now. Ed has outlived anyone who might have harboured a desire to come for him in the night. His gun toting days are over.

He jimmies the panel of flooring and taps in the numbers he needs to get the safe open. He reaches for the passports, shuffles through them- _Belgium, Botswana, Brazil_ \- until he hits _Canada_. He’ll be Joel MacRae, Nova Scotian, as he drives Pinkman north. He might not have Casimir’s uncanny talent for accents, but he knows his strengths.

He flings the passport onto the bed, flips through a couple of files for the rest of Joel MacRae’s paperwork, selecting what he’ll need for the trip. He takes his wallet out of his pocket, removes everything of Ed Galbraith’s and winds a rubber band neatly around everything before dropping them into the safe. Into the wallet now goes Joel MacRae’s credit and health insurance cards, his driving licence (record of one parking ticket, Ontario, promptly paid), gym membership (expired), his Halifax library card (currently reading: _The English Patient_ ). Ed knows it’s details like this that matter- just enough flavour to turn an alias into a person. He calls it ‘window dressing’.

Once he’s removed about CAN$2,000, that’s it- all he needs to do in preparation for the trip, aside from swapping the plates on the truck. He’ll get Pinkman to change them himself, give him something productive to do. All evening he’d been slinking around the house like a kid sent to spend a holiday with distant relatives, afraid of making some faux pas. Ed figures completing a few small tasks on his own will do him good.

Ed still feels a prickle of guilt taking the framed photograph of Nadia out of the safe. It seems wrong to have her locked away in the dark, but it is the only picture of her he has and Ed has a not entirely irrational fear of fire (he’s seen what napalm can do); the chances of his house going up in a blaze are incredibly slim, but then Ed is a cautious man. It’s also why he doesn’t have the photo in Albuquerque, it doesn’t fit within the narrative of the life he’s made for Ed Galbraith. Up on the outskirts of Valier, though, he can be himself.

Nan knows all about Nadia, and even though he won’t be seeing her until he drives back from Canada, Ed doesn’t believe in keeping ghosts in the bedroom. He closes his safe, takes the photo and the flowers to the living room. Nadia would have preferred a view of the mountains anyway.

~

Jesse is in Casimir’s room, not really sure what to do with himself. He feels strangely thrown, like he’s arrived at a friend’s house for a sleepover only to find the friend isn’t there, and the parents are insisting he stay regardless. He tries to think of it as a hotel room, but it seems wrong to try and erase Cas’s presence like that. Jesse doesn’t want to erase his presence anyhow- the traces of him are still calming and Jesse is on the cusp of being overwhelmed.

He can’t ignore the fact that the bed is a milestone, another ‘First Time Since…’ to tick off his mental checklist. Technically, The First Time in a Bed Since… had already happened, at Skinny Pete’s the night he got away, but Jesse swung between fear and stupor and the act of lying in the bed has gone from his memory. Ed’s camp beds in the basement weren’t uncomfortable exactly, but neither were they _beds_. This is a real bed. A queen, a king- Jesse isn’t really up on his mattress sizes- and the sheets look expensive, higher quality even than what he got at ASAC Schrader’s house before…

He turns to distract himself with the DVDs. A library of 90s sitcoms: _Frasier, The Fresh Prince, 3 rd Rock from the Sun. _A lot of nature documentaries. Comedies. Films in black and white that Jesse has never heard of. Foreign movies with actors he doesn’t recognize and titles he can’t pronounce. Disney.

Casimir has art too, hanging on the wall above the bed. In frames and everything. A wide blue sea; a scene of a market town in the Caribbean maybe; flying birds; a tiger in a thunderstorm that looks kind of familiar; hands drawing themselves that Jesse knows is MC Escher because he always paid attention in Middle School art class. Jesse finds himself wondering what Casimir’s place in Casper looks like and then his own future room in Somewhere, Alaska.

His bedrooms in Albuquerque didn’t reflect his personality so much, they were crash pads. Places to hang in, places to pass out. He didn’t decorate so much as fill it with stuff he thought looked cool, impulse purchases made while high that he regretted later. He had Big Plans for that duplex when he first moved in, until his drive to see them through fizzled out. He liked Jane’s place, that big mural over her bed, how her defences fell if Jesse managed to ask the right questions about some photograph or knick-knack.

He decides Ellis is going to have art on his walls. Maybe his own.

This is such a delicate idea that Jesse can’t yet fully fathom. He feels it might crumble if he grips hold of it too soon, too tightly, but it’s there all the same and it gives him a small thrill.

Jesse manoeuvres himself between the bed and the window to the bedside table. Ed had mentioned the iPod cable in a drawer and there it is, curled like a snake on top of a well-thumbed paperback. The author is Márai Sándor (whoever he? she? is) and the title looks like someone upended a bag of Scrabble tiles on the cover. It’s even worse inside, consonant combinations that make Jesse’s head spin, every other letter adorned with dots or accents. Flipping through the pages, he considers what it must have been like for Cas, not just a new state, but a whole new country, different culture, different language, the vertigo he must have felt trying to navigate his way through to a place of safety. Thank fuck Jesse’s monolingual ass doesn’t have to do the same. Alaska is still America at least, despite how very unknown it is to him.

He knows Cas has never gone back to Sarajevo, but what remains unknown is if he wants to. Would he, after seventeen years, want to go back to Albuquerque? Too soon to tell. He makes a mental note to see if Ed has an atlas. He doesn’t actually know where Sarajevo is.

Jesse plugs the iPod in to charge and, finally, turns to the bed. It’s not even 9 o’clock yet and he’s already spent 11 hours of the last 24 asleep, but perhaps those fractious nights in the basement are catching up with him. Perhaps it’s simply his body going into overdrive; now that it remembers how to sleep, it’s all he craves. He switches the light off before he climbs in, switches it back on immediately.

Too dark. He’d not considered that. 

He rolls the blind over the window up. The moon is a couple of days away from being full, but the night sky is clear. It should be enough. He turns the light off again, lets his eyes adjust and is relieved to find the room bathed milky blue. He gets into bed.

It’s fucking amazing.

He figures he ought not be surprised, given Casimir’s side hustle as a mattress salesman- of course he’d deck out his second bedroom with the good shit, but this is truly mind-blowing. He feels all the joints of his spine align; his bones are practically sighing with relief.

“Ahhh, yes, _biiiitch_ ,” he sighs himself, squirming with delight. The sheets are made of something that makes him realize he’s been sleeping under sandpaper all his life. He burrows under them and the phrase ‘high thread count’ emerges from the depths of his subconscious. As he’s running an appreciative hand over the comforter, an idea tickles the back of his mind; he’s wearing sweats, a long-sleeved t-shirt but he peels them off, kicks them out from under the covers and onto the floor. The sheets are cool against his skin. He slides around them in his boxers, grinning like an idiot until the muscles in his face hurt.

There’s a tender patch on his back where Ed had knelt on him the previous day. He’d checked it out during his bath earlier, and coupled with his healing gunshot wound, the compound scars, the medley of other scrapes and older bruises running to green and yellow, he’d looked a bit of a mess. Not that he’s mad about the bruises Ed gave him; he vaguely recalls trying to hit him in his hailstorm panic. He might look a mess, but he doesn’t currently feel like one.

A stomach sleeper, he rolls onto his front clutching one of the pillows to his chest. The covers have a heft to them, a comforting weight and Jesse is out within minutes.

~

Casimir is in his living room trying to hit 45km on his stationary bike before 9 o’clock. He’d cycled standing for a while, resistance way up until he felt a twinge in his bad ankle and lowered it again. He tries to keep his RPM above 110.

After Ed and Jesse left, he’d laid in bed for an hour, for two, then risen, cursing, just has he had done at 2 am. He’d eaten Ed’s omelette then struck out for the Best Buy a couple blocks away from his house. He walked it since he didn’t trust himself to drive at that point.

Once he’d gotten his replacement iPod and re-uploaded his playlists, he tried again and sleep, finally, came. Four hours of it. Not enough.

Which is why he’s trying the bike, keeping his legs pumping in time to _The Small Print_ by Muse. ‘Absolution’ is the perfect cycling album, in his opinion, with its mix of fast and slow songs. He plays it on repeat.

He’s imagining Jesse in his bedroom in Valier, or rather trying to. Multiple Jesses performing multiple actions simultaneously, a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat, only the options are asleep/awake not dead/alive.

Jesse drooling into his goose down pillows; Jesse messing up his DVDs; Jesse undressing and tossing his clothes on the floor; Jesse undressing and folding his clothes neatly on the arm chair in the corner; Jesse snoring; Jesse lying awake imaging multiple Casimirs performing multiple actions miles away in Casper.

 _Don’t get your hopes up_ , he thinks.

9 o’clock and he’s managed 47km. He gets off the bike and immediately sinks to the floor. His legs are jelly. He’s a sweaty, panting mess, but he reckons that will do it. Sleep has to happen now. While he’s waiting for his heart rate to go down, he reaches for the last slice of the pizza he’d ordered for lunch. He didn’t get around to groceries in the end, but the pizza has peppers and beef, fulfilling Ed’s meat and vegetable directive.

In the bathroom, he peels off his clothes with his back to the medicine cabinet mirror, turns the shower on with the heat way up. The water pressure threatens to knock him off balance. He wants to feel pummelled by the water, droplets coming at him like tiny Muhammed Ali’s. He can still feel the spectre of Jesse’s head on his chest, and it’s solidifying, turning into something resembling loss. He’s under the water for a long time before he feels he can emerge, red as a lobster, loose limbed and light-headed. His ears are ringing. He sits on the edge of the bathtub for a couple of minutes until his vision clears.

He wipes a hand over the fogged-up mirror and between his bad eyesight and the mist in the air, he can’t make out the scarring on his chest and torso. He pretends there’s nothing wrong with his reflection as he brushes his teeth. He spits into the sink and swings the mirror open. There’s a cluster of prescription bottles, for pain management, for insomnia, for anxiety. Cas hesitates, decides yes, he’s going to need the pain medication tonight, unscrews the lid and taps two pills into his palm. He’s overdue a review. He makes a mental note to call his doctor tomorrow.

The bedroom is icy; he likes to sleep with the window open, get the air flowing, but he also needs it dark. He draws the black-out curtains, lets his eyes adjust and then sighs in frustration. He left a light on in the kitchen and he can see the faint glow of it through the crack under the bedroom door. He turns it off, returns, satisfied that the room is now as light-less as it gets.

He flops onto the bed in his boxer briefs. It’s a duplicate of the bed in Valier. One of the perks of being a mattress salesman, wholesale rates on the good shit. The sheets are cool against his skin as he slithers under the covers and for a minute, he indulges himself, squirming in delight. He hopes Jesse finds it as comfortable as he does.

A back sleeper, he stretches out, long legs seeking out the cold patches in the fabric. He untangles his headphones, needing the music _in_ him. He has a playlist in case of emergencies like this, when his body and his head aren’t in alignment. Cellos mostly, something slow and sonorous. He combs a hand through his hair, grips it- a comfort thing he’s done for as long as he can remember. Those were always the worst nights, when his arms had been bound and he couldn’t reach up and soothe himself. His hand tightens at the memory. The sound of the cellos helps loosen it again.

The covers have a heft to them; when bunched they could almost be a body his arm is wrapped around. There’s a cool breeze blowing that feels like a breath against his neck. An hour passes and then, finally, sleep comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To save anybody a curious Google, the book in the drawer is "A gyertyák csonkig égnek" or Embers by Hungarian writer Sandor Marai (given name first in this instance). Which features two old friends reunited after *many* years, so... themes. Seemed fitting.


	15. Reclamation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some uhh, emotionally complicated physical sensations happening in this chapter. Not all that experienced when it comes to writing about "carnal acts" so I hope this works for y'all. Title sums up the mood I was going for. Figure sometimes the heavy stuff is best approached with a lighter touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some charged language here, used within context. Racial/homophobic slurs.

It’s not yet dawn when Jesse wakes, feeling heavy limbed and relaxed. He drowses, enjoying the sensation of being ensconced in clean blankets and smooth sheets. He’s in no rush to get up. He tests the temperature of the morning air by sticking a leg out from the covers, drawing it back into warmth. He stretches, arms over his head, feet flexing, a delightful burn in previously tense and knotted muscles. He passes a hand over the stubble on his head and as he rolls onto his back, he’s dismayed to discover he has a hard-on.

He’d repulsed himself, that first night free at Skinny’s, assessing himself in the mirror. The idea of standing before someone with his now damaged body and the memory of all the filth that had once encrusted it had seemed fraught with difficulties enough to make it impossible. Who would want him? He didn’t even know if he wanted to be wanted; all he desired while in the pit was invisibility, for the eyes, the hands, the voices to leave him alone. Desire, and all it entails, is still too thorny an issue to contemplate.

He flings his arms over his eyes, groans, hyper-aware that he’s a guest in another man’s bed, in Ed’s fucking _house._ He wills his erection away. He recites the seven times tables. He lists Presidents.

And then there’s the way the sheets feel.

How they settle and swell as he moves under them.

How they caress. How they could almost be hands. Soft and gentle.

 _Not helping,_ he thinks. Is he honestly getting turned on by bedlinen?

And then Jane is laughing in his head.

 _Babe_ , she says affectionately, _this is a new one. You’re going to have a meltdown in Bed, Bath and Beyond._

It was with Jane that Jesse first thought honestly about the ways in which he liked to be touched. Nobody had ever asked him until she sat him down one morning in a no-nonsense manner and laid out exactly what she was and was not into. As closed and evasive as she could be with her emotions, she’d been open and frank when it came to sex. He’d been startled by her earnest seriousness and she’d not allowed him to hedge his answers. She had wanted honesty and Jesse had surprised himself with what he’d shared- things past girlfriends and hook-ups had done that he felt he’d had to like, but didn’t really. Jane had kinks, she liked to push the boundaries, but Jesse never felt that there would be repercussions if he’d said _no_ , nor did he feel like less of a man when Jane gave him a run-down of his ‘moves’ that didn’t, in fact, turn her on.

He’d felt like a proper adult in a proper adult relationship for the first time in his life. _This is some real healthy shit,_ he’d thought, as they sat across from one another discussing safety and consent that first morning. A sexual turning point. He even went to a clinic to get tested for the usual suspects before they went all the way. Jane didn’t even have to ask. He’d just done it. _Check me being responsible_ , he’d congratulated himself when he told her he had the all clear.

He’d initiated a similar sit-down chat with Andrea too, a little less eloquently, a little clumsier, but Andrea had been impressed. No guys had ever asked about her wants or boundaries before-hand and the sex that followed had been soulful, without the druggy film that had covered the final times with Jane. She hadn’t been as assertively kinky, but she knew what she liked. She could surprise him in bed with what she wanted, so much so that one time he’d blurted out “But you’re a _mother,”_ and she’d responded with a stern look that put him in his place, said “And what? Now I’m not allowed to _come?”_ Another sexual turning point. Another juvenile prejudice stripped away.

It was with Andrea that he’d discovered the subtler ways in which he could be made to shiver with pleasure. A finger brushing his neck, a hand slipped under his t-shirt when they were walking, nails casually grazing his scalp- once, twice- then gone again as they were watching a movie on the couch. She’d lean in to whisper something and the combination of her warm breath, her ticklish lips conspired to raise goosebumps and set off butterflies in his stomach.

But that had all been in the Before. Now he was in the After, resigned to the fact that many of the things that he’d once enjoyed were now jumbled up with memories of the pit, of the compound, of Nazis’ hands. No shivers of pleasure when Kenny ran a finger down his neck; the wrong kind of goosebumps when Jack whispered in his ear. Butterflies that brought on nausea instead of bliss. Six months bound in chains complicated thoughts of handcuffs in the bedroom.

The Nazis had been predictably pornographic when it came to breaking him down. They resorted to taunts Jesse had heard all throughout high school: fag, pussy, wimp. They insulted his size, questioned his ability to pleasure a woman and thanks to Heisenberg’s parting shot, they knew all about Jane. They compared her with Andrea, asking which was the better lay, the spic or the junkie? They took him apart, tried to soil his memories of them, and when his retaliations were met with fists, Jesse learned to keep quiet, tuck them into those rooms Casimir talked about, hidden inside himself for safety.

An erection in the compound had only been a liability, and there is, even now, the residue of fear of what will happen to him if Jack finds out.

 _But Jack is dead,_ Andrea, softly. _They all are. Your body is your own again_.

He thinks about Jane. He thinks about Andrea. He opens the rooms he secreted his most precious memories of them into and after a long moment of hesitation, he reaches his hands under his boxers.

At first, he’s clumsy, too rough; partly because of how long it’s been since he touched himself, partly in response to his conflicted feelings. He shouldn’t enjoy it. Pleasure isn’t for the likes of him.

He thinks about Casimir who, knowing about all the terrible things Jesse'd done, had not been repulsed, who still wrapped his arms around him in the back of the truck. His breathing quickens. He stops trying to make it hurt.

He remembers Jane’s hands, adjusting his grip, becoming familiar with how he feels, harking back to all those conversations about what _he_ likes, what _he_ wants. It’s not easy; there are shadows at the edges of his vision, waiting for him to tip into memories he’d rather forget.

He remembers Andrea’s mouth, how she tasted, how playful she could be and the shadows recede. His hands are steadier, firmer, faster. The need he feels untangles from the shame which dissolves away, leaving only sensations he hasn’t felt on his own terms in so long.

 _So long_.

The last time with Andrea. The last time with Jane. His heart constricts in his chest. He grits his teeth. The shadows return. He’s in danger of slipping into anguish.

He kicks the covers off the bed, a mix of vented anger and practicality; there’s no way he’s going to risk coming on them.

 _Oh, that’s considerate of you,_ Casimir this time, roguish amusement shining in his eyes.

“Jesus,” Jesse growls out loud, “do you mind?” He can feel this imaginary Cas holding back a quip about Jesus’s thoughts on masturbation. He refocuses his attention on the fingers around his cock. Jesse’s free hand roams, skimming the skin of his stomach, knitting into the pillow by his head. The shadows fall back, replaced by a lopsided grin.

_That’s the spirit._

It doesn’t take long after that.

There’s the tingle under the skin that works up his thighs, the knot in his guts untwisting and a lightness spreading through his chest, his neck, into his head and when he opens his eyes, he sees nothing, there’s only himself and the steady rhythm of his hand, his heart pumping in his ears as his knees draw up of their own will, feet bracing against the mattress as his hips jerk- once, twice- and he finally breathes again, a gasp, out and in.

And then he’s laughing, giddy from orgasm, from the absurdity of having Cas in his head at the critical moment. Kind of undermined the momentousness of the occasion, though not such a bad thing considering how his thoughts had begun to tip into darker places.

_Like I said, a sense of humour helps._

“I’m charging rent if you’re gonna hole up in my head,” Jesse mutters. It’s starting to feel crowded in there. Still, if there are going to be voices, better the women he loved and Casimir than Heisenberg and Jack.

But thinking about Heisenberg and Jack is harshing his post-orgasm high. He looks down at himself, surveys the damage as it were, in the blue pre-dawn dimness. His stomach is covered in come. He could use a cigarette.

He lets himself bask in the moment, lost in the way his body feels. He shivers a little, from the cool air he’s now exposed to, from the aftershocks that are radiating out from his navel. Little waves of delayed pleasure. He shifts a pillow back under his head, sighs, riding out the last tingles with his eyes closed. His stuttered breathing evens out, deepens. He could easily drift back to sleep for a few more hours. Maybe Ed will have whipped up some culinary masterpiece for breakfast by the time he wakes.

His eyes snap open at the idea of Ed wandering into the bedroom with a well-meaning plate of scrambled eggs and sausage, discovering Jesse lying in his… what? business partner’s? adopted son’s? bed covered in spunk. Ed dead, old heart giving out from shock.

 _Shit, shit, shit_ , Jesse sits up, lies down again as the movement sends the mess on his stomach trickling down his sides. He considers the bedside table. Under the drawer is a cabinet section which he had not rummaged through the night before. He shuffles towards it on his back, undignified but effective. He swings open the door and _bingo._ Kleenex.

 _For allergies_ , phantom Cas demurs.

“Sure, man. Whatever.”

He takes a handful, wipes himself off and pulls up his boxers. He examines the under sheet with the intensity of a hotel health inspector. He’s somehow, magically, in the clear.

It’s a little lighter by the time he wriggles back into the sweats he discarded the night before; not quite sunrise but when Jesse looks out the window the view of the mountains is more defined. He shoves the wodge of tissues into his pocket and stalks out to the hallway.

The house is quiet; Ed’s bedroom door is closed. Jesse squints and blinks in the comparatively harsh light of the bathroom. He flushes the tissues, winces at the noise of the toilet. He feels sticky, so he strips, adjusts the heat of the shower and lets the water run down his back. The room fills with steam and Jesse breathes it in. Even his lungs feel clean.

He’s not all that keen on strawberries, so he opts for another shower gel that promises to get him smelling like bergamot (whatever that is) and amber (though he’s not sure what’s alluring about fossilized bugs in tree resin), pumps a dollop of it into his hand and scrubs it all over. It’s not bad, kind of musky and fresh. It’s not until he’s drying himself off that he realizes he didn’t flashback to being hosed off in the compound while in the shower. Another milestone.

He changes back into his t-shirt and sweatpants, leaving off the ruined boxers. He folds them into his pocket, since he’s not about to saunter into the hallway with them clutched in his hand. He needs to do laundry. The steam billows out as he opens the bathroom door, mingles with the scent of brewing coffee. Ed must be up, though his bedroom door is still shut and Jesse can’t hear anyone else moving about. Back in Cas’s room, he adds his underpants to the pile of dirty clothes he’s been accumulating since the basement. Maybe Ed has a washing machine. Anymore mornings like the one he’s just had and he’ll be out of essentials.

The only clock he’s seen in the house is in the kitchen; it tells him it’s only just gone six. Jesse isn’t usually a morning person; even the Nazis didn’t start him cooking until well past noon, but he finds he’s starting to like these early starts, the look of the day when it’s new. Maybe Ellis will be an early bird, seize the day type. In bed by ten and up with the sun.

The coffee smells good as it percolates in the machine. Ed is still nowhere to be seen. Jesse takes a mug from a rack under the cabinets, fills it. The milk in Ed’s fridge is from rice instead of cows, and the only sugar he can find is something called muscovado which is dark brown and has the consistency of wet sand. He uses them anyway, and his coffee tastes fucking weird, but he’s not about to complain. The heat of it feels good sliding down his throat, pooling in his stomach and he stands as he drinks, looking out the kitchen window at the lake in the distance as it slowly turns from silver to gold.

Ellis will have many mornings like this, Jesse tells himself. Quietly at peace. Content.


	16. A Day of R & R: AM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say I do know where I am going with this- I promise. Apologies if this is excessively wordy and detailed, but that's just who I am I suppose. Thanks for sticking with me! And I hope you enjoy. Going to have to split this baby up like 'Casimir Effect' so this bit might seem to end somewhat abruptly, but it's all part of the master plan.

1982 and the man Jesse Pinkman knows as Ed Galbraith is in a ramshackle hotel room in Bosque de Xiloa, Nicaragua. Nadia lies with her back to him and he’s tracing with his fingertips the raised purple stretch marks on her thighs and stomach. Her daughter, Alma, is not yet ten. The fan spins overhead sending out soft _whumps_ of air that raise goosebumps on her skin and ruffles his hair. Outside, the world has been erased by rain; gone are the views of the green mountain, the lake, the window is a rectangle of swirling grey and white mist. The sound of water is everywhere. The air is cool yet humid.

They’ve used this room before, always arriving separately and taking long meandering routes to shake any tails. The owner of the hotel owes him a favour or two, so he’s sure word won’t get back to the wrong people. For the room, he pays double what the owner earns in a month to ensure that it won’t. It’s quiet, not an area frequented by his colleagues, or by her husband’s many eyes and ears. It’s a place they are able to relax, let their guard down. Whenever they talk about the future, they do it in this room.

He tells Nadia he’d had plans drawn up, when he was last in the States, for an extension on his house in Montana. When Nadia tries to picture Montana, it comes to her as a thin line of brown-green grass beneath an immense blue, like the drawings her daughter made of the world when she was very young; the sky taking up too much of the paper, tiny stick figures scrunched in the bottom corner. It could be desolate, all that open space, but the way he talks about it makes it sound clean, clear, calming. He says they’ll get Alma a pony, a horse when she’s older. Alma, grown, a blur of wind-whipped hair and mane as she goes racing over the plains; the idea sends Nadia’s heart into her throat with joy and worry.

The extension is for a second bedroom, one for them. Alma can have the one that’s already there.

“You can see the mountains from every window,” his voice is deep and reassuring. Different mountains than the ones she knows in Nicaragua. Grey and white, not green. High and peaked and jagged. In the winter there will be snow. For all her thirty-six years, Nadia has never seen snow. She imagines it to be grainy, like sand, only colder, lighter. She imagines the three of them careening down hills in a sled like she’s seen in movies, his strong arms wrapped around them, keeping them steady. 

Nadia’s hair is fanned out across the pillows. He runs his hand through the dark, heavy curls, twines them around his palm like a rope. He pulls her closer, the feeling of his skin against hers as he lowers his mouth to her ear, kisses it.

“I promise,” he tells her, “I will get you out of here.” It’s not a promise he will be able to keep.

~

It’s not yet dawn when Ed wakes, but he doesn’t linger in bed. He gets up, stretches, shuffles into his slippers, makes his bed, pulling the sheets and covers tight. He smooths out the creases and when he is satisfied, he leaves the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Experience has taught him the best remedy after waking from troubling dreams is activity. In the kitchen he washes the dishes he’d left soaking overnight. He runs a damp cloth over the already pristine counter. He scoops coffee into the machine, adding more grounds and water than he usually does to account for Pinkman. He hears the shower rumble to life as he’s stepping out onto the patio. The sound of water cuts off as he slides the glass doors shut.

Ed doesn’t have a garden exactly; the patio leads off into the grasslands. Tarragon, mint, sage grow wild. The rabbitbrush is in bloom, already blazing yellow against the blue light of the almost morning. He sneezes-once, twice- and kicks his slippers off. The slate tiles are cool and damp under his feet. In his mind’s eye he sees Casimir loping through the shrubs and long grass like an antelope. It’s not a single memory, but one composed of many overlapping moments. Cas at twenty-two, at thirty, last year, that spring. It’s an image that never fails to set him at a greater peace than the one he might have woken with. 

Ed understands that there is solace to be found in open spaces. Casimir knows it too; Ed senses Pinkman does. Why else request relocation to Alaska? He worries that the kid doesn’t know what he’s in for; the Lonely Planet Guide Ed bought him a week ago remains suspiciously under-leafed, under-thumbed. He consoles himself as he sweeps a foot back, bends his knees into _Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane_ \- there’s still time to prep him. It’s a long drive to Haines.

Ed is _Repulsing the Monkey_ when memories of another long drive pop into his head. One with Walter White. There was a man who failed to appreciate the value of contemplation in wild spaces. Ed had hoped, when he dropped him off at the New Hampshire cabin, that he would find…something. Peace. Acceptance of his circumstances. God. A dang hobby other than capital-R-nursing-of-Resentments.

Ed sighs. Replacing thoughts of Nadia with Walter White is not an improvement. He starts again, feet together, hands by his shoulders and then… breaths. In and out.

The sun is fully above the horizon when he finishes. The lake below ripples gold. His mind is emptier than it had been. He feels cleaner, clearer, calmer. He has a day of rest and recuperation ahead of him. His slippers are wet with dew but he doesn’t mind. It’s refreshing. He slides open the glass door to his living room and Pinkman is there, curled on his couch with a large book (the atlas?) in his lap, and a mug clutched to his chest.

“Yo,” he says, voice edging into something like relief. “What’s with the slo-mo kung-fu?”

~

Jesse is on his third cup of coffee by the time he spots the flowers. They weren’t there the night before and because he’s become accustomed to seeing small changes in his environment as potential threats, their sudden presence makes him uneasy at first. He still doesn’t know where Ed is. The lack of sound and the caffeine he’s mainlined contribute to his state of agitation. His legs go like pistons when he tries chilling on the couch. The flowers are on the mantel above the fireplace, in shades of orange, yellow, red. His Aunt Ginny would have been able to name them; Jesse, at most, can tell they are not roses.

Whatever they are they smell nice. He decides Ellis will grow plants, or at least try to. Jesse didn’t have much luck keeping Ginny’s plants alive after she died, but Ellis will do his research, be sure not to over or underwater. He’ll keep to a schedule and his plants will flourish.

There’s a black and white photograph in a frame next to the vase and as Jesse stands to peer at it more closely, he’s startled to recognize Ed; younger with way more hair, unbuttoned shirt revealing _abs_ and _pecs_. Jesse doesn’t know whether he should be impressed, intimidated or grossed out by the idea of Ed having, like, actual muscles.

There’s a woman in the photo too, but Jesse can’t see her face. It’s obscured by a hat, peak of it pulled low over her eyes. She’s laughing, head thrown back, a hand reaching out towards Ed’s arm and the camera has caught the moment right before she touches him. It’s candid shot, they both seem unaware of the photographer. Their poses wouldn’t look out of place at a cocktail party, except Ed is lounging up against the side of a jeep and she’s got a rifle slung over her shoulder where Jesse would expect to see a handbag. They’re both dressed in camouflage and combat boots. 

It’s then Jesse catches some movement out the corner of his eye and it’s Ed, outside, in his pjs, arms waving like he’s swatting flies real slow. His back is to Jesse, but he imagines the look on his face is one of frowning concentration.

The Schraders had a photo of Mr. White on their bookshelf and finding that had been alarming; Satan in a Santa suit. The photo had seemed like a prop Heisenberg had snuck onto the shelf himself and while Jesse isn’t alarmed in the same way by this photo of Ed exactly, it certainly draws a comparison. There are so many versions of Ed- the hardass version he’d tried bargaining with in the vacuum store. Cas’s Paternal Ed. Chef Ed with his junk food hang ups. Ed the Extractor. And now Beefcake Ed, who makes women laugh and inspires lasagnes.

Experience had taught Jesse not to ask too many personal questions too quickly of a certain kind of older man. Mr. White would get all abrasive. Mike would shut down. If he’s going to try to get to know the guy, he’s going to need to pick his moments carefully.

Thinking the bookshelf might give him some insight, he browses the titles, expecting to find the same kind of books he saw at the Schraders', but there’s no Stephen King at Ed’s. No military histories or westerns. There are cookbooks, which isn’t all that surprising, their spines warped and pages thick with post-it-notes. What is surprising are the art books, photography mostly, but painters too, O’Keefe among them. Jesse’s hand hovers over it for a full minute.

He swerves his finger to an atlas, draws it out and retires to the couch. It’s an ancient cloth-bound thing. Russia is still labelled as the USSR. Germany is split in two. The index tells him Sarajevo is in Yugoslavia and an info box on the page lists it as the site of the upcoming 1984 Winter Olympics. Jesse does the math; he’d have been the size of a peanut in his mother’s womb at that point. Cas would have been twelve. Laying out their histories in the mattress store, he’d confessed to pickpocketing wealthy tourists as they watched athletes whipping down slopes on skis and sleds. Jesse imagines him, skinny arms and knobbly wrists slipping into coats and purses. So young and already on the way to becoming a career criminal. 

Jesse thinks of Tomás Cantillo and his heart contracts for the second time in an hour. _Too early in the day for this_ , he thinks; _this_ being the wild swing between the chaos and the calm in him. He’d had the calm just minutes ago, why couldn’t he hang onto it longer? 

Ed, finally, comes back inside and Jesse’s mind gets a little quieter.

“Clears the head,” is all he says in response to Jesse’s question. Ed, in his old man candy-stripe pyjama set. His leather slippers. His hair poking up at odd angles. There’s an offer under the statement.

Jesse shakes his head _no_ without fully understanding what he’s saying _no_ to. Ed goes to the kitchen. His slippers leave damp prints against the wood floor. Jesse follows.

The coffee pot is mostly empty. Ed turns to him with dismay in his eyes.

“How much did you drink?”

Jesse shrugs and Ed sighs.

“Think about slowing it down,” he says as he refills the machine. Jesse contemplates his raw cuticles. Maybe Ellis is a one and done kind of coffee drinking man. Jesse cannibalizes himself after two cups.

“Was the bed okay?” Ed asks and Jesse feels his face grow hot.

“Yeah, man. Goldilocks.”

A quizzical eyebrow is raised.

“Perfect,” Jesse clarifies. “Like, real nice, comfy shit. Just right.”

“Got a way with words, you,” Ed says, in a tone that’s not sarcastic.

Jesse leans against the wall in the kitchen, waiting for instruction. 

Ed is slicing apples, rubbing them down with cinnamon before he softens them on the stove. He throws Jesse a look over his shoulder.

“Reckon you should get something solid in you before you vibrate outta your skin.”

“What’s for breakfast?”

“I’ll handle dinner, but think you can fend for yourself otherwise?” Jesse finds the idea oddly paralyzing, so used to just eating what he is given. He doesn’t know where to begin.

“What are you having?”

Ed is having oatmeal. Jesse curls up his lips in disgust.

“Alright, well, to each his own,” Ed gestures to the cupboards. “I’m sure Cas has junk, if that’s what you’re after.”

Cas does have junk. Pop-Tarts slotted between Ed’s dried porcini mushrooms and nigella seeds. There are packs of ramen. Half-eaten boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Special K. Microwave popcorn. An unopened bag of Cheetos. Jesse just about dies with happiness. Into the toaster goes something neon and full of sugar as Ed shakes his head, muttering about purple not being a food group as far as he knows.

Jesse retreats to the couch to eat. Ed’s still cooking his oatmeal when he returns.

“Still hungry?”

He is.

“Can I have eggs?”

“You don’t need to ask.”

Ed hands him a frying pan and briefly shows him how to work the burner. Jesse expects Ed to comment on his egg-breaking technique or tell him he’s cooking them all wrong, but he doesn’t. He intercedes only once to replace the fork Jesse is using to scramble the eggs with a wooden spoon, biting back a strangled grunt as he does so.

“Metal will scratch the pan,” he explains. Jesse knows he could have said _you will scratch the pan_ , or even _you’ll ruin it-_ Mr. White probably would have gone for the latter- but Ed is always so careful not to wound with his words. In the vacuum store he was dispassionately encouraging, not massaging his ego exactly, but not crushing it either, saying just enough to keep Jesse from losing himself entirely. He wonders if Ed’s always like this with his more skittish clients, or if it’s just something he senses he needs to do with Jesse.

He wonders what Ed was like with Mr. White; he wonders how Mr. White behaved around Ed. He wonders if he’ll work up the courage to ask.

Ed waits for him to plate up and they eat together at the table. Jesse has to admit the oatmeal and stewed apples smells pretty good. He might have to revise his opinion; Ellis could be an oatmeal man.

“Feel up to a couple of tasks?” Ed asks once Jesse has finished eating. He does; his caffeinated jitters have diminished.

Ed excuses himself, returns with a weighty paper bag. Inside are Canadian licence plates.

“For the truck,” he explains. “Am I right in assuming you know how to do what needs to be done?”

Mike had taught him how to change plates. Even little tricks like making sure to dirty up the new ones to make them look as though they’d been on the road awhile. How strips of duct tape could be used to change the numbers in a pinch. They’d even started on evasive driving right before Mike had to take some time to recuperate after Mexico. There were so many things Mike was meant to teach him that he’ll never now learn.

Jesse feels his heart contract for the third time that morning. He takes the bag and folds into himself for a moment. When he looks up, Ed is looking at him with what could almost be concern. Up until now it’s a look he’s only seen him give Casimir.

“Take your time. No rush,” he says and Jesse realizes he’s gripping the bag, white knuckled. He exhales and loosens his fists.

~

Ed has kept the truck out of sight in the old-

“The what? The ‘ _cow house’_?”

“Yeah,” Pinkman says. He gestures in the direction of the barn. “Where the cows live. Or would, if you had, like, cows.” His eyes widen with curiosity. “Did you have cows?”

“No.”

“You should get some, yo. Make your own cheese.” Ed does love his cheese, but not enough to make an enterprise of it. The barn would have been used for horses in any case, but he doesn’t like to think about that.

“Well, I’ve laid out all the tools you’ll need. Holler if there’s a problem.” He sips his coffee, thinking of other tasks he can set him.

“Reckon you could do with some clean clothes too,” he says after a spell, which sets the kid off into an unexpected blush and stutter. Ed decides he doesn’t need to know what prompted that response. He just points out the best setting to use on the machine and leaves Pinkman to it.

Ed showers. He shaves. He wipes down the bathroom sink. In the bedroom he uses one of his many cell phones and calls his accountant to make arrangements for transfers of funds: the man in British Colombia gets about $60,000 and $90,000 goes to Casimir. The accountant will take a cut out of those figures, but it’s a reasonable 4.5%. Ed has sent a lot of business her way and she’s not a greedy woman. She values long term stability over making cash fast, and Ed is about as stable as they come.

He uses another cell phone to check in with the man who dealt with the Fiero and who watches the store while Ed is otherwise indisposed. He gets $5,000 for this, plus whatever he’s managed to strip from the car and a pay check for his retail hours. None of it lost to the accountant either; Ed pays him cash.

All is quiet in Albuquerque. The store-minder tells him there have been no calls for the Max Extract, which is a relief. Ed has had a busy year, what with Goodman and White and a few other, though far less high-profile clients who’d felt compromised by the whole thing. His most profitable year in a long while, but after he drops Pinkman north, he could definitely use a holiday.

Los Cabos appeals, out in Baja. Sit on the beach all day with some beer. Swim. Ed’s got a standing invitation to head there when the mood strikes him though his visits are bittersweet. Memories of Nadia abound. He’d made a promise to take her out there and failed to keep that one too.

But the sweet memories outweigh the bitter, so he goes every year, twice if he can swing it. 

Business concluded, Ed has the day to himself. It’s windy outside and brisk as summer is drawing to a close, but the sun is shining and Ed could do with stretching his legs.

~

Jesse tells himself to get a fucking grip. He’s changed plates dozens of times, with Mike and without him, but once he’s done, he hears Mike in his head, gruffly pleased saying, _Not bad, kid,_ and it undoes him.

Had it had been real, the moment he’d stood in Ed’s kitchen and been still and content? He blames the coffee, he blames the eggs, he blames himself for being too emotional. All his life tears sprung up in his eyes over what seemed to be the least little thing. There’s a whole ocean inside of him that threatens to break out. At some level he knows it can’t continue like this, this oscillation between control and a loss of it. Cas has told him it will take time.

Knowing doesn’t make him any less impatient.

He wipes his eyes. He tidies the tools and old plates away where Ed said to put them. He closes and locks the doors and he wants to slump against them and weep because Mike had cared about Jesse, and because of that Mike was dead.

All the _if-onlys_ and _could-have-beens_ play out in his head.

If only Jesse had been the one to get Mike’s go-bag and the car from the airport, it wouldn’t have been Mr. White, who wouldn’t have shot him and left him and… but why start there? Why not go all the way back to the moment he could have changed everything. Save Jane, save Andrea, save Mike and ASAC Schrader and…

He braces himself against the doors and breathes. The air tastes clean, clear, calming.

Back at the house, Jesse keeps himself busy. He is finding activity helps give respite from troubling thoughts. He does the breakfast dishes Ed has left soaking in the sink. He dries them. He puts them away. He does laundry. He sits on the floor in front of the machine and watches it spin until doing so seems less like a balm and more like a bad coping mechanism.

He makes noodles and cracks an egg into the broth halfway through cooking. That was one of Emilio’s tricks for zhuzhing up a bland packet of ramen. Sometimes he’d add sweetcorn or chopped chillies. One of their post-cook traditions, bowls of ramen, a spliff shared between them, car-crash reality TV. Emilio has been pretty silent in his head so far, but thinking of him, of the raspberry slushy he became has Jesse’s stomach going like the washing machine.

Vomiting in Ed’s kitchen seems like blasphemy though. Jesse would be less mortified puking in the box and having to lay in it the whole way up to Alaska. Although… that’s not really a great mental image either.

He really needs to stop thinking about puke.

Impulsively, he sticks his head under the tall faucet and lets the water pummel the back of his head. It’s cold, refreshing in fact. The feeling of it running down his neck, the white noise of it in his ears helps to settle his mind. He switches it off once he’s sure he has control over his stomach and opens his eyes to Ed watching him.

“Oh, um, hey.”

“You did the dishes.”

No mention of his impromptu kitchen shower.

“Uh… yeah. Is that…okay?”

“It’s considerate of you,” Ed nods to the outdoors. “I’m heading out. Just gonna get some provisions.” Jesse sees that he has a backpack and a…camera?

“I changed the plates. If you want to check them or something. Make sure I did it right.” Ed looks at the puddle forming at Jesse’s feet, at his soaked shoulders.

“Well, are they liable to fall off?”

“I dunno, I mean… no. I did it right. I just thought, like, maybe you’d want to check?”

“You say you did them right, then you did them right.”

There’s a brief silence before Ed tosses Jesse the dishtowel and goes to the fridge. Into the backpack goes the grapes, some water, a big chunk of cheese. Ed straightens, says, “Don’t stay inside all day,” and leaves. Through the kitchen window Jesse watches him walk through the long grass, red shirt standing out against the yellow blooming flowers and the blue sky. He watches as Ed stoops down and brings the camera up to his eye.

~

The camera had been Dan’s, and the photograph of Nadia and him by the jeep, that had been Dan’s handiwork too. He’d surprised him with the negative as a ‘thank you’ for something or other. Ed couldn’t remember.

Dan had been a saucer-eyed kid who followed him around like a puppy, eager to please. Too sensitive for the surveillance work he’d been sent out to do, too soft for the field. He'd resented having Dan shoved under his wing at first, resented the responsibility of looking after some green recruit. But over time Dan had surprised him with his competency, his loyalty, his bravery.

 _You both just looked so happy_ , Dan had said, and he’d swallowed the lecture rising up in his mouth about appropriate use of government resources and accepted the negative. Hidden it away in a false bottomed suitcase, forgotten until he found it again, a few days after everything had gone to shit and he was halfway to Mexico.

When the moment came for them to get out of Nicaragua, Alma was at school on one side of the capital city, Nadia was on the other. There wouldn’t be time to get them both, unless…

 _The daughter knows you_ , Dan said. _You get her. I’ll get to Nadia._ And he had gotten out of the car, leaving his camera behind.

Dan had been his friend. A true friend, a rare thing in their world where every offer had to be dissected for ulterior motivations.

And it had been Dan who was there with Nadia when they were dragged from the safe house and shot as he watched, helplessly, from across the street.

Perhaps if the traffic hadn’t been so bad, perhaps if he’d turned left instead of right, just driven a little faster, things would have turned out differently, but Ed knows there’s no use wondering about _if-onlys_ or _could-have-beens_.

Instead, he tries to look through the camera the way he thinks Dan might have, and with every click of the shutter he becomes alive again, if only for an instant.

~

Jesse slurps his noodles on the floor of Casimir’s bedroom, back pressed against the foot of the bed and his head tilted up, watching some big freakin’ fish eat a bunch of smaller fish. He can hear his mother imploring him to sit further back because he’s too close to the TV, _damn it_ , and he’ll get square eyes. Even though the TV is a rectangle, but anyway- this is definitely the best position to take in all the spectacle.

Jesse had decided to watch whatever was in the DVD player, partly because that meant he didn’t have to decide for himself, partly because he was curious about what Cas had watched when he was last at Ed’s house. _Blue Planet_ , apparently, and David Attenborough’s voice is filling his head up with static.

When the noodles are gone, he makes popcorn, because it’s another thing that takes up a chunk of time and keeps him busy. He senses that today is something of a test-run. Ed’s being deliberately hands-off so Jesse can see what it’s going to be like for him when he’s finally _alone_ alone, fending for himself in Alaska.

 _Doesn’t bode well_ , he thinks, watching the seconds tick down on the microwave. Today was meant to be one of rest and relaxation or recuperation or whatever that second R means. That might be the case for Ed with his Tai Chi and his nature rambles, but for Jesse it’s been a day of regret and regression.

He discovers he can’t eat the popcorn. Maybe it’s because he’s already eaten more than he’s lately been accustomed to, maybe it’s the bitterness rising in him that’s turning it to cardboard in his mouth; maybe it’s the days ahead of this one that are weighing on him, or maybe it’s the myriad voices and faces whipping around his mind like they’re on a nightmare carousel. Maybe it’s all of the above.

The calm of the morning seems very far away, as he climbs back into Casimir’s bed and wraps himself in the covers. Pressed up against the pillows, he can hear his own heartbeat; it’s disconcerting, like it’s not his own. He has an urge to sleep again, body using unconsciousness like a reset button against the churn of his thoughts.

 _It won’t always be like this_ , Cas tells him softly. 

“You don’t know that.”

_I do._

“Yeah, well, those pills in the bathroom suggest otherwise,” he mutters, immediately feeling like the biggest dick. He opens his eyes to the giant squid on TV giving him a reproachful look.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he sighs, trying not to feel crazy for apologising to a voice in his head, but phantom Cas has retreated, leaving behind a bruised silence in Jesse that not even David Attenborough’s voice can mask. As conflicted as he is regarding the voices in his head, he still doesn’t want Cas gone on account of him being an asshole.

He needs to get up, move, _do_ something apart from wallow. Walk, maybe. Casimir likes walking. It might tempt him back.

In getting his shoes from the kitchen, Jesse discovers what he thought was a restless ten-minute nap has lasted closer to four hours. Once again there’s no sign of Ed. Would he have really been out for that long? He pictures the old guy as he last saw him, bag, camera, bright red shirt.

Red shirt.

Jesse has watched too much Star Trek with Badger for that not to mean anything.


End file.
